Some Major .Mac Features

.Mac provides many features, some of which integrate with iPhoto. Explore the .Mac page at www.mac.com to configure and use each tool, to download the free software like Backup, and to access various special offers (Figure 5.29). For full, up-to-date, information about .Mac, I strongly recommend Joe Kissell's Take Control of .Mac at www.takecontrolbooks.com/dot-mac.html.

Figure 5.29. Explore the .Mac Web page to learn about all that .Mac offers.

iWeb

Apple's new iWeb program, part of iLife '06, integrates with .Mac to make uploading photo slideshows (and other Web pages) easy (see the next page for details).

iDisk

Apple provides 1 GB of disk space for each .Mac user, accessed like any other disk. To mount your iDisk, choose My iDisk from the hierarchical iDisk menu in the Finder's Go menu (). Predefined folders store backups, documents, pictures, movies, public files to share, Web pages, music, and software you can download.

When you publish photos using .Mac Slides, the files are uploaded to your Pictures folder (Figure 5.30). Web albums you publish via iWeb live in the Web folder.

Figure 5.30. Your iDisk stores any pictures you upload to HomePage or .Mac Slides.

Mail

.Mac provides you with another [e-mail]. You can either retrieve mail from it directly (via your email program or a webmail client) and/or have it forward messages to another account.

Whither HomePage?

Until the release of iLife '06, you created Web albums (and other types of pages) on .Mac using the online HomePage tool, which integrated with iPhoto for easy uploading of photos. HomePage still exists on the .Mac Web site, but doesn't integrate with iPhoto 6 in any way. HomePage was easy to use only through iPhoto (it was always clumsy to use via a Web browser), so I highly recommend that you use iWeb instead now.

You can link to your existing HomePage albums in iWeb, or you can export the same photos to iWeb and publish them again, deleting the HomePage albums and related photos when you're done, to avoid wasting your iDisk space on duplicate pictures. Or you can just leave the existing HomePage albums alone and create all new albums in iWeb. It's up to you.

Groups

.Mac Groups enable you to share photos, messages, calendar events, announcements, links, and even iDisk space with friends.