John Siracusa: ‘Game Over, Man’

John Siracusa on .Mac and Sync Services:

Why is .Mac slow? Apple.com always loads quickly for me. I can download 5GB disk images from Apple’s developer connection web site at over 900KB/second, which is about as fast as my cable modem can go. Why is .Mac unreliable? The iTunes store gets a tremendous amount of traffic—surely much more than .Mac — and yet it remains available and responsive nearly all the time.

At this point, I’ve given up hope of discovering the answers to these questions. I no longer care why .Mac doesn’t work like it should. I’m not going to continue to plead with Apple to make .Mac better. .Mac has been around for four and a half years now. It’s enough already. I just want my applications back.

Siracusa calls for third-party developers to stop relying on Sync Services. My experience has been that the problems with Sync Services are two-fold: (1) the general performance problems of .Mac; and (2) bugs in Mac OS X’s Sync Services implementation. One of my little birdie friends tells me that Mac OS X 10.4.9 should go a long way toward fixing #2. Like Siracusa, though, I’ve pretty much given up hope on .Mac ever being a reliable high-performance network resource on par with, say, the iTunes Store.

★ Friday, 29 December 2006