Product ReviewsInternet
It has long been acknowledged that iChat, Apple Mail and the Mac OS X Address Book are among the best communications tools for the Mac, and Safari is close to best for browsing. So it's not surprising they've captured a large part of the Mac-using population. Rather than fight this, AOL seems set to embrace what Apple has to offer with a pre-production version of what it calls AOL Services for Macintosh, which is now available for download on its beta site. Using Apple tools instead of proprietary software means you can access your data from any location and over any connection, rather than being forced to dial into an AOL access number or use the AOL interface. It also solves the problem of poor Mac support for broadband
AOL Services for Macintosh is open to AOL members only and requires a valid screen name before you start your download. It customises your OS X communications tools, adding IMAP access to AOL's email servers to Mail, your screen name to iChat, your stored AOL contacts to Address Book and your saved AOL bookmarks to Safari. All of these are optional steps and you're free to choose. We tested them on OS X 10.3.8 and they worked perfectly, maintaining our existing account settings and adding the AOL components as extras. This beta release is aimed at a US audience, but we found it worked flawlessly with a UK-based AOL account. In spite of this, Services for Macintosh is still very much in the development phase, and AOL's beta licence stipulates it must be used only for testing. Details of the finished product are sketchy - even the name may change. We'll reserve our final judgement, but if the finished product is as good as it promises, this is a good reason for hanging on to your AOL account for the foreseeable future, particularly if AOL's native client is one of your main reasons for considering a switch. NEEDS: PowerPC G3 processor + Mac OS X 10.2 and higher (Mac OS X 10.4 Beta isn't supported) + 128MB RAM + 10MB available hard disk space By Nik Rawlinson
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