One of the more interesting announcements from yesterday’s Stevenote was MobileMe, the .Mac replacement, now taglined as “Exchange for the rest of us”. That is, it features ‘push’ syncing between devices, eliminating the need to manually sync. The idea being, your data lives ‘in the cloud’ (man a lot of quotes going on here), and is accessed from whatever device you happen to be using at the time, any Mac or PC, iPhone or iPod Touch. The web app versions of mail, iCal, iPhoto etc. are particularly refined.

I use macs at home, will definitely get an iPhone in a month, and have to use a PC at work, so these sorts of cross-platform syncing tools are something I keep a keen eye on. I’m quite happy with Google’s suite, with a few exceptions (no to-dos, no cloud document storage other than office docs). There are a few holes in MobileMe too (no notes or to-dos?), and some big questions (can you use your own domain?), so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I like the direction things are going though.

Ars: Video-sharing site use surges as writers’ strike goes on. Yeah, that would happen, wouldn’t it? As Nate Anderson points out, the data both supports the writers’ position that online revenue is important, and warns the studios that people can live without their output. Last thing they want is a baseball strike scenario, where the sport itself never really recovered its following.

Just finished getting Google Apps for your domain runing on the ol’ AR. Got to say, it’s a pretty compelling bunch of apps. We all know about gmail, and that’s all good – although probably the least important part for me. What is really appealing is hassle-free document sharing and collaboration, and the sheer excellence of Google Calendar. Not only is the web interface great, but it’s super-easy to share calendars with everyone on your domain.

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Released yesterday. I gave it a shot. It’s a spotlight-alike, for instant searches of your local files, invoked by default via the clever command-command doubletap.

I installed it yesterday and gave it a shot. (Warning: suspicious installer.) I de-installed it later that day. Basically, there were a bunch of runaway crazy processes eating up all my CPU and RAM, and Google Desktop was the only thing I’ve installed lately. It couldn’t have just been the indexing, it was in effect hours later. Also, for the avid quicksilver user, it has little to offer.

I will say, though, that despite using it very little, there were a couple neat things. 1. It must be live-indexing Safari’s history, since sites I had browsed minutes ago were showing up in the search results. 2. It indexes mail messages, which spotlight does but quicksilver does not (or at least I can’t figure out how to get it to do that). Which is nice.

Not 20% of CPU nice, however.