iCloud, MobileMe, And You – Update

More Info: Apple has officially answered all of the outstanding questions since this was posted.  Please see this post for additional info.

It’s been about a week since the Worldwide Developer Conference came to a close, and the entire Apple community is still sifting through all the information, and new toys that Apple has dropped on us. Each day brings new discoveries and insights into the future of Apple devices. Over this week new information about MobileMe and iCoud has come to light.

Websites and iWeb

As I discussed in my first post, the  web hosting component of MobileMe has been discontinued. This week we seem to have confirmation on the loss of iWeb (see story here) as well. As I said In my last post, don’t panic. The iWeb you are using today will continue to work for the forseeable future.  In the end, I see this as just another reason to transition to a WordPress or Drupal site.

Back to My Mac

In my last post I speculated that Back to my Mac was likely to be removed. I’m delighted to report that I guessed wrong. I have since found that Back to My Mac is in the System Preferences on the developer preview of OSX 10.7 Lion. I still think that Back to My Mac’s utility will be replaced by other iCloud functionality. But, for now, those who are using this service can breathe a sigh of relief.

iDisk

I have still not seen anything official on the fate of iDisk.  That being said I can also find no mention of it in OSX 10.7.  So my previous comments on iDisk still stand.

My Advice

It is quite clear that Apple is getting out of the website business.  If you use Apple website development tools or deployment services you are going to have to transition to non-Apple solutions.  Honestly this is not as scary as it sounds. You are going to have to learn some new things, but it also means that you are going to have whole new worlds of opportunity open up to you as well.  Since you still have a year to transition I feel that my initial advice is still valid.  Don’t Panic, think about what you want to do in the future, and prepare to transition in manageable steps.  Keep an eye on this site as the weeks progress for more on how to get through this transition.