Mounting MobileMe iDisk on Windows XP

One of the discussions on the Apple MobileMe iDisk forum is how to get iDisk mounted as a drive on Windows XP. While Apple has provided instructions on how to do this on Vista nothing was said about XP. The solution that worked for me was similar to the one that Apple provided for Vista and involves using the "Add Network Place" wizard.

mounting-idisk-on-windows-xp

If you’re using Windows XP, open the Explorer, click Computer, and then click “Map network drive” in the toolbar. Update: Apple has updated the MobileMe client for Windows. The instructions for Vista seem to work for Windows XP as well. Follow the instructions as above, enter http://idisk.me.com/[username] in the folder field, and click “Connect using a different user name.” Enter your MobileMe member name and password, and then click OK. That's it. You are done. No need to read the rest of this. Then click the link that says "Sign up for online storage or connect to a network server" to launch the "Add Network Place" wizard. Then Click OK.

Click to choose a network location and click next.

choose-a-network-location

Then type http://idisk.me.com/[username] in the folder field, and click next.

enter-idsk-info

Enter your MobileMe member name and password, and then click OK. This mounts your iDisk on your desktop, so you can work with it as you would any other hard disk.

mobileme-username-and-password1

2008-08-11_0805

Mucking about

In my home, I  have more computing hardware than people.  The wife runs Windows on a Dell laptop.  The kids share another Windows machine.  I use 2 macs ( PowerPC and Intel ) and a Dell Windows desktop converted to run FreeNAS.  No server class hardware here.

Parallels on OS-X will run Windows 95,98,Me,XP, and Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, and MS-DOS so I have quite a lot I can play with.  I can also run OS-X on VMWare can be done here:

I  chose Parallel's because WMWare beta on OS-X was slow and Parallel has coherence mode which allows me to run Windows applications like they were native Mac applications. To paraphrase the site, "When a user switches to Coherence mode, their Windows desktop disappears, leaving their Windows applications running directly on their Mac desktop."

Now if only they can pull off the same for Linux..........

Right now Apple is getting my dollars and my attention because I feel they are on an upward innovation curve.  Microsoft in my opinion is on a long slow death spiral.  Linux and open source will only get better and I can't wait for that long ago promised Linux desktop.

Songbird

A group of developers calling themselves Pioneers of the Inevitable has launched an early beta of a multiplatform web based music player and browser called Songbird. Some members of the groups had worked previously on Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. The current release is version 0.2 and is available for OS-X, Linux and Windows XP. I downloaded the current release onto my MacBook and when launched Songbird offered to import my iTunes library which it did quite successfully. It also included a number of extensions for Shoutcast and WikiPedia ( a strange one ). The code appears to be based on the Mozilla/Gecko engine and the group pays homage to the Mozilla Foundation. The user interface seems out of place on the Mac with its darkened theme and black windows but is otherwise very "pretty".Song Bird

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