Pranav Chavda

View from my new office in Ahmedabad, peaceful, no?

FYI all, Will be mostly away from the internet for the next few days.

If, like me, you are a subscriber to Apple’s MobileMe suite of web-apps, and also run linux on your computer, when you tried to access the service on your linux machine, you probably got this:

Apparently, It is only possible to run MobileMe on either a PC or a Mac. MobileMe was marketed as a way to be able to view and edit your email, calendars, photos and files from any computer – this, however does not apply to computers running linux.

There is, of course a a very easy workaround: Install the User Agent Switcher add-on on firefox and select firefox on vista or firefox on mac as your user-agent. That does the trick just fine.

Another way to access MobileMe on a Linux box – something I just found out and made me want to write this post – is that when me.com is opened on Konqueror – KDE’s default browser, MobileMe doesn’t prevent the browser from letting the user log-in. Sure, Safari is based on KHTML – created by the Konqueror community, but it sure is great to see that they haven’t blocked at-least one linux browser.

What would be better, of course, is that they officially let linux users on firefox access the service they have paid for and in the mean time, mention konqueror as a possible way to access MobileMe on a linux OS.

…is mobileme for the rest of us.

Funambol, is a free (as in open-source) way to get push email, contacts and calander on your phone (not just the iphone). I signed up and downloaded it on my WM5 based HTC Wizard, and I am already thinking about what to do with my dotmac subscription – which will transition to mobileme soon – I guess I will just keep it for the idisk and photo and media sync that funambol doesn’t have yet.

Anyway, if you are in the market for a free push email, puch contacts and push calander solution, I recommend Funambol.