Last night I signed up for Apple’s .Mac free trial period, having made the decision to migrate completely over to OSX this year. I’ve been interested in iCal and iDisk for a while, wondering how they worked—I like the idea of being able to publish a calendar online to keep track of scheduling between Jen and myself, and also having a secure external file server for client work. My first impressions are a lot like my impressions of OSX—powerful, but not friendly. The metaphor for .Mac’s home is poor at best; I signed up with my own email address but I haven’t gotten a confirmation or any other instructions; I don’t know if I have a ‘home page’ or not, and I don’t know how to find my published calendar.

I know that I haven’t delved deeply enough into the service yet, but usually I can spend about a half hour in front of an application and figure out at least how it works, if not how to use it. Last night I spent about an hour trying to make sense of the .Mac site and metaphor and it still doesn’t make sense. I’ll report on my experience more in the future.