Every now and then you are faced with a task where an old tip comes in very handy. I recently had the task of helping someone get 300 megs of photos from a Macintosh to a PC 10 feet away. The first idea was a flash drive that they had in hand. After several attempts to mount the flash drive on the Mac they weren’t able to make it happen. The second idea was burning the files to a CD-ROM. They had no CD-Rs available and the closest place to purchase them was a half-hour drive away (they were out in a rural area of Tennessee). Third was to try and connect the two machines on the wireless network. Now I know nothing about networking a PC (and they knew even less) so when the Mac didn’t automatically see the PC I was stumped. Fourth was the idea of email but with 300 megs this would have taken way too much time and attention.

Then I remembered .mac …. oh wait, it’s now called Mobile Me … the iDisk and my public folder. I had them copy the entire folder of photographs from the Mac Mini to the public folder on my iDisk. Obviously that’s an easy process that even the most computer illiterate person can be walked through via the telephone. Then came the process of downloading the files from the iDisk to the other computer. The PC was running Vista but the iDisk Utility for PC is for Window XP. While a Google search revealed that this utility will run on Vista it dawned on me … there is a better way.

Way back in 2006 the official .Mac blog outlined a way to access a public folder via a web browser. This post is long gone in the days of Mobile Me but I had posted the tip on the Editblog as well. A quick trip into the archives and there way the answer … plug this url into a web browser and you can access someone’s iDisk public folder:

idisk.mac.com/membername-Public

They plugged this into the PC’s browser and were downloading the 300 megs of photos as soon as it had uploaded. It’s an easy to use interface as you just click the little download arrow on the right get retrieve the files and seems to work in any browser. I often forget about this ability to access iDisk public folders via the web so this was a good reminder. I really hope that they don’t change this function with the transition to Mobile Me or if they do they will at least publicize it as it’s a great way to utilize iDisk. Maybe this tip will come in handy for you as well.