Why does iDisk suck so hard?

One of the great things about MobileMe is how tightly it integrates with the whole Macintosh operating system. Applications can connect to MobileMe resources with minimal fuss, making it easy to synchronise mail, browser book marks, contacts, calendars and so on.

Practically all Apple’s applications are designed to use MobileMe at some level; the iLife applications for example can interconnect with the MobileMe Gallery, allowing the user to share movies and images. The iWeb program is designed primarily as a web design program for users with MobileMe accounts, allowing them to quickly create attractive, media-rich web pages. Similarly, while the Backup program can be used to create copies of your data on other types of media, it’s part of the MobileMe package, the assumption being subscribers can use this simple backup utility to store important files on the MobileMe servers.

All well and good, you’d think, but there’s a problem. Uploading stuff to the MobileMe disk space, the iDisk, is incredibly slow. We’re talking hours and hours simply to move a few megabytes of files. The fact you’re given a whopping 20 GBs of space seems generous, but in practise, you’re never going to fill it. Not with iWeb, not with Backup, and not with the MobileMe Gallery.

Spend any time on the MobileMe iDisk discussion forum over at the Apple.com web site, and you’ll see lots and lots of complaints about the speed of the iDisk. Simply opening folders can take several minutes, and yesterday, simply trying to delete (not move, not copy, not upload) around 20 MBs worth of files from my iDisk via the Finder took over an hour before it then gave up, citing errors with files that weren’t there or contained no data, whatever the heck that might mean!

Uploading the same quantity of files can easily take over an hour, assuming it works at all. Despite the Finder interface, you can find that simply dragging-and-dropping files doesn’t work as flawlessly as it should. In my case, I couldn’t update the files on my iDisk until I’d deleted them all first, and only then could I upload new versions of those files without getting nonsense error messages. The fact this meant I had to upload 20 MBs worth of stuff instead of the few hundred KBs of files I had actually changed added insult to injury.

(I should mention at this point that at times I use Freeway Pro to update my homepage, and frankly, it’s not a whole lot better. Among other things, Freeway Pro insists on copying across every single web page file in my site each time I update, not just the ones I changed. Needless to say, that slows things down dramatically. Whether that’s the fault of poor design in Freeway Pro or a problem with the way iDisk names, stores or tags files once they’re copied there, I cannot say.)

So it’s not simply that the iDisk is slow, it’s that the connection is often flaky, generating a variety of errors that don’t make sense (and for which Apple offers no explanatory advice). In short, it sucks, and it sucks hard.

Here’s the thing though: iDisk isn’t free. It’s a premium service for which users pay $99 a year. Yes, that includes some other goodies like an e-mail account, but most of the package works because of the connection between the iDisk and the applications on your Macintosh. The iDisk is very definitely at the heart of the package.

Leo Raymaekers has done a nice little study of how iDisk works when accessed through the Finder, and among other things, it’s clear that moving a group of small files takes much longer than moving one big file, even if the sum of the small file sizes is less than that of the one big file. It also turns out that some other, third party applications work with iDisk in a much faster way, including Cyberduck.

After downloading Cyberduck, I was amazed to see how much faster it was. Jobs that took the Finder hours took Cyberduck minutes, and without any obscure error messages. Cyberduck has a drag-and-drop interface, and while different to the Finder, it isn’t particularly difficult to use. So, yes, there is a faster way to move files between your Mac and the iDisk.

But this doesn’t get around the bigger problem here: what about all the other applications that use the iDisk, both third-party (like Freeway) and home-grown (like iWeb). If iDisk sucks so incredibly hard, and it does, then why should people bother with MobileMe accounts at all? Virtually all the services MobileMe offers can be put together using free or inexpensive alternatives, in the form of things like Facebook, iGoogle, GMail, Yahoo Groups and Dropbox (which, for the first 2 GB, is free).

Apple needs to take a long, hard look at MobileMe. The concept is brilliant, and when it works, it works wonderfully. But Apple aren’t quite there yet in terms of iDisk speed and reliability, and as a service meant for sharing and backing up files, the iDisk is practically useless.