iPhone 4 film – “Apple of My Eye” from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

Perhaps more interesting than the initial movie shown above is the ‘making of’ documentary that follows. It is clear that the guys that made this film know a thing or two about movie making. They also have the benefit of some specialist gear to help them get those great shots with the iPhone. The use of a tripod (and in this case, dollies) makes all the difference (as I am forever telling my students when they learn to make their own movies).

I’m keen to see other examples of movies made entirely on the iPhone so please feel free to post links in the comments below. I can’t wait to see what kids can do with this technology.

I’ve been a MobileMe subscriber since the beginning, when the service launched under the iTools moniker and didn’t cost a penny. I’ve lived through the relatively uneventful .Mac days and have survived to tell the tale of the recent MobileMe launch fiasco. Despite the misery of those dark days after launch, when several of the fab new features that had been touted by Apple failed to appear and some users even lost their email (yes – lost!), the MobileMe service has continued to appeal to me due to its one-stop-shop approach and the generally decent integration with the desktop Mac OS and the iPhone. However, since upgrading my two home Macs to Snow Leopard during the past 10 days I have been alarmed and disappointed to discover that my iDisk has been having some trouble syncing correctly. And when I say ’some’, I mean ‘a lot of’. I’ve been trying to sync less than 1GB of data since yesterday and it still hasn’t completed over 24 hours later.

Having had a look Apple’s discussion forums it is clear that I’m not the only one suffering from this problem, post Snow Leopard upgrade. And neither is this the first time that I’ve found myself tearing my hair out in frustration with this ’service’ offered by Apple. The history of iDisk syncing has not exactly been what you might call illustrious. Why is it that Dropbox simply just works (at least in my limited experience), and doesn’t cost me a penny for 2GB of storage, and yet iDisk, which has been around for nearly a decade, still can’t make up its mind whether to behave itself or not? Surely Apple has enough experience and expertise in this area to be able to offer a product that can match or even out-perform the stability, reliability and speed of the likes of Dropbox? Why pay for a slow, unreliable service when you can get something much better for nothing? Okay, I know that the basic MobileMe iDisk capacity is ten times greater than that of the free Dropbox offering, but wouldn’t you rather have a smaller capacity sky-drive that works than a capacious one that fails to sync reliably? Actually, come to think of it, I do want a capacious drive but I also want it to work as it should and that is a key reason why I have been paying good money for a MobileMe account for the past several years.

So, I’m hoping that Apple will roll out a software update pretty darn quickly that will fix this latest issue and then I can get back to using my iDisk for the purpose for which it was designed.

One final observation… The new iDisk app for the iPhone is very neat and seems to perform very well. Hopefully Apple will concentrate on making the desktop client just as good.

UPDATE:

This issue seems to have been resolved, at least for the timebeing, possibly by the 10.6.1 update, although Apple’s notes make no mention of fixing any iDisk issues. I guess it is also possible that something has been changed on the iDisk servers to correct the problem. Whatever they’ve done, I just hope that iDisk continues to function reliably in future as I’ve had enough of it failing to deliver.