Perhaps you’re aware that you can connect to a Mac back home with Back to my Mac, a service offered by MobileMe. When I heard of this feature, I did some reading and set everything up right, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I think Back to my Mac is a really cool idea, but it could use some work. It could even tie very well into Apple’s possible new tablet-sized device.
Enter MobileMe Home. After entering your MobileMe credentials on your Airport or Time Capsule, your network becomes accessible when you’re away from home. No enabling settings in some tab in a preference pane or forgetting to put a file on your iDisk: you can connect back home from anywhere with the Finder on your laptop, with an iPhone app, and from public or other computers through the MobileMe web interface.
MobileMe Home’s web interface allows you access to your Mac’s files, use a web-based client to do simple screen sharing, stream a few songs or videos from your iTunes library, and locate, wake, sleep or shut down your Macs from anywhere. On any Mac or iPhone, you can connect to your network to do all of the above, and more, like connecting to a non-Mac server or device on the road.
Even better, since your laptop (and possibly tablet) get on the move, you can track its location thanks to Snow Leopard’s Core Location features.
Check out a larger size of my rough MobileMe Home mockups at Flickr by clicking the preview below:
MobileMe Home is not an official Apple product, nor do I know anything of planned features of MobileMe. You should consider this an idea, or perhaps even a dream, seeing how technically MobileMe Home would probably be incredibly hard to implement. I just wanted to share it with the world.
oh fuck, this is awesome lol. do want!
Spoke to someone on the MobileMe team last month and they seemed pretty damn excited about something they were working on.
If this is it I’ll jump for joy. More and more people are getting more than one Mac and it’s becoming a real pain keeping them all in order.
And as always, beautiful images Sebastiaan.
The day that any web browser can establish a VPN session on your desktop is the day that security researchers have a collective anyeursm ;)
This looks so good I rolled off my chair. Amazing!
This could integrate really well with Quick Look.
http://www.joeoreilly.co.uk/uploads/quicklook.png
I’m kinda speechless about that idea…. and your mockups!
You have some brilliant ideas my friend, it really is no wonder Apple wanted to hire you. Your Latitude web browser idea, this, and all your design work.
Brilliant!
I’d happily pay for that! And how did you do your beautiful angled screen shots at the beginning of the story – do you really photograph your screen or is that done in Photoshop?
WANT! :)
Alan: I just snapped a photo with my SLR :) Possibly doable in Photoshop, but I’m a lazy guy.
…or could they be *real* snaps of a *real* feature in action from a super-secret lab at Cupertino?!
Perhaps 9to5Mac will pick this up tomorrow with confirmation from an anonymous source that this feature is almost definitely slated to be coming at least by around Q1 2010 as long as it isn’t possibly pushed back because they have to finish working on the tablet.
Maybe.
This sounds like an entirely Apple-esqe concept of Hamachi by the LogMeIn folks. It does the whole “your network, anywhere” but they have no decent support for Mac OS. MobileMe would definitely be worth the asking price with this feature. It takes BackToMyMac and goes the logical next step. VPN, file-sharing, Remote Desktop, iTunes Sharing… sounds good to me.
I love these ideas! Awesome concept!
This idea isn’t bad. It would be nice to see some new features
Perhaps I missed the wording, but for a minute I thought this was a real thing. I was ready to go check it out. Dang.