Apple Previews New .Mac Webmail

Usually, when Apple unveils new products or features, they do it through Steve Jobs, in a big auditorium with a larger online and offline audience than most heads of state can command. Even the smaller features that are forgotten a few short months later like the Nike+iPod and the iWeb have had their own slides in a magic Jobs spectacular.

Not the new .Mac webmail. It just got a web page.

Historically, Apple doesn’t ‘preview’ stuff on its site with little press attention- unless it is a feature that has sorely lagged behind the best in class web email providers. Many Apple watchers- including a few at this site- have been questioning Apple’s commitment to .Mac lately. The services are dated and barely competitive with free competing services from Google and other upstarts. And so, maybe too little too late, the web mail gets an update.

Or will in the near future.

According the the preview page, the new and improved .Mac webmail will resemble Apple’s fan favorite Mail.app quite closely. This means that- for the most part- your user interface and functionality experience should be what you would expect from Mail.app, while having the flexibility of the always, anywhere availability of the web.

This is an approach that Google has not followed with GMail, but Yahoo and Microsoft have with their latest now-it’s-beta-now-it’s-not email services. GMail keeps the web email experience different from the interface that you would expect from a client software. This means no drag-and-drop, and so forth, though many keyboard shortcuts exist. MSN Live and Yahoo Mail’s latest incarnations try harder to replicate the Microsoft Outlook experience under the assumption that the Outlook UI is the one people are most comfortable with. The new .Mac mail has followed the route of MSN and Yahoo.

According to the site, the new version will have the following features:

• The Mail.App Look- As mentioned above, the entire site will look like Mail.app, including the Spotlight-like box, message panes and previews.
• AJAX for Less Load Time- Similar to the new versions of MSN, Yahoo and GMail, the new .Mac webmail will only refresh the part of the page where a change is requested for faster site access and more seamless UI.
• Keyboard Shortcuts- Keyboard shortcuts, hopefully similar to the familiar Mail.app ones, are also available in the new webmail.
• Drag-and-Drop- What more can I say- multiple messages at a time can be dragged and dropped just like Jobs intended.

Overall, it looks like a worthy application and it is about time the folks at Apple paid more attention to .Mac. While I do not have access to subscription numbers, I doubt that .Mac subscriptions have been keeping pace with other Apple departments in recent times. A solid upgrade to the back-up features should be expected when Time Machine arrives with Mac OS 10.5, but this is a good start. I await iCal online, iPhoto online and iTunes.. no wait, we already have that.