[MacSmiley]

Great. To get "hundreds of templates", many of which are just unusable, you have to spend another $30-50 or more on top of our $99/year subscription? Chuck that!

By the way, that stationery button just mentioned doesn't exist on OS X Mail prior to Leopard. Those of us forced to run Tiger do not have stationery... period. iCards is a complete loss for us.

Additionally, can you use Leopard's stationery from your iPhone? From the Windows PC at work? Universal access was one reason iCard has such a following. The other reason was not our own images on the iCard but APPLE's images! One template with hundreds of beautiful and quirky art and photographs made iCards infinitely more flexible than Leopard's stationery. There's no substitute for Apple's iCards!

iCards were simple, they were elegant, and they didn't bombard recipients with advertisements, HTML, Flash, or blinking GIFS. The combination of whimsical images and text in one small, savable JPEG in the iCard message was hard to resist. Everyone I sent them to loved them!!

Meanwhile, iCards were free for everyone to use, and it was great advertising for Apple. Leopard Mail stationery is no such animal.

iWant Apple iCards Back!!

[MacSmiley]

rumplestiltskin said:

Been using Mail for years and hadn't even looked up in the right corner of an outgoing eMail. Thanks for this story as it reminded me that there was this feature and I had never even tried it...

>

You've never noticed it before because it wasn't there. Mail stationery is a Leopard-only feature. Those running Tiger can't use it. You can't use the stationery from an iPhone. You can't use stationery from the PC at work.

Besides, iCards were free. It didn't cost $30-50 on top of what we've already spent on third party products... including the $99/year for our subscriptions... to get the variety of images in Apple's stock collection of art and photography... and still fail to achieve the same goal. Mail templates are just a skeleton. iCards were the whole meal all in one little JPEG. There is no comparison.

[LarryMcJ]

"Apple suggests you try the Stationery feature in the OS X 10.5 version of Mail"
This might be nice if I used Apple Mail...which I would readily do if it ever fixes the problems Mail has working via IMAP with Gmail. Yes, it "sort of" works...but we all know there are still many problems and they're on the Apple side...not problems with Google.
Larry

[Ilgaz]

What do they make it look like by requiring Leopard templates? It is like "Paying us $100/year is not enough, pay $140 for Leopard".
Believe or not, everyone didn't upgrade to Leopard. It should be Apple first to know it.
They are doing such things which are seriously hurting their corporate image. I don't even bother mentioning iPhone policies.
PS: No, Apple is not a grocery store, it can't be Steve Jobs sitting and deciding things like "Lets remove iCards.", there is a certain team at Apple who decides these things and they act like a gang.

[Ilgaz]

I don't want to sound harsh but Apple really doesn't listen to petitions.
If 10K people unsubscribed from Mobile ME stating "removal of iCards" as reason, that would be an effective petition.

[MacSmiley]

Ilgaz said:

PS: No, Apple is not a grocery store, it can't be Steve Jobs sitting and deciding things like "Lets remove iCards.", there is a certain team at Apple who decides these things ...

It is my understanding that Steve Jobs is the quintessential micro-manager, that no decisions are made final at Apple without Steve's stamp of approval. He could not have been ignorant of the emotional impact iCards have had on senders and recipients these past 8 years, nor could he have failed to realize the negative emotional impact the removal of iCards would have by canceling them.

Therefore, it is Steve Jobs himself whom I hold personally responsible for a heartless business decision, as well as for the callous disregard for the vexed feelings of consternation and puzzlement, and finally, grief of people going to use the iCard website and getting nothing but a generic MobileMe error page.

[MacSmiley]

LarryMcJ said:

"Apple suggests you try the Stationery feature in the OS X 10.5 version of Mail"

This might be nice if I used Apple Mail...which I would readily do if it ever fixes the problems Mail has working via IMAP with Gmail. Yes, it "sort of" works...but we all know there are still many problems and they're on the Apple side...not problems with Google.

That's a good point, Larry. iCards were rarely down. They were always there, up and running properly, from anywhere that was also up and running properly. When I couldn't get GMail to work properly with Mail, I thought it was me!

By the way, the big difference between Mail stationery and iCards is this: Personal taste aside, Mail stationery templates are only skeletons without any meat and potatoes. A finished, sent, and received iCard was a whole 3-course meal, which didn't turn anyone into a blueberry.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Ilgaz said:

I don't want to sound harsh but Apple really doesn't listen to petitions.
If 10K people unsubscribed from Mobile ME stating "removal of iCards" as reason, that would be an effective petition.

Here's the problem with trying to organize petitions and mass consumer action. The usual estimate around the Web for MobileMe user base is 2 milllion. Get 10K people to unsubscribe and you have just cut the user base by an absolutely devastating 0.5 percent. You will need to do much, much better than that.

If you compare 10,000 people to the estimated Mac user base of 23 million, it's 0.04%. That could be less than a rounding error. Apple might replace those subscriptions in less than a single quarter, and new subscribers wouldn't have ever heard of iCards.

[Mergatroidal]

MacSmiley said:

!http://img.skitch.com/20080829-pd1tbihsyse179rp3w2p398yp2.png|thumbnail=true!

... [B]y the way, while trying out some other online third party ecard sites, my email address ended up on Google.

Thanks, Apple, for helping to expose my address to even more SPAM than ever!

MacSmiley, pick one from the dozens of free Web site e-mail accounts, set it up and use it only for risky Web ventures and experiments, and feel free to use it when you won't care about this spammed address.

[MacSmiley]

Fortunately the problem website owner is working on the situation. It's Apple I am angry about for this, though.

As far as future experiments go, seeing the words pick-up or retrieve ecard on the website is as far as I go. I tried Mailinator, but no graphics, not even JPEGs, show up in those emails. So that's not exactly useful in assessing what a real recipient would see.

I'm sold on PostCard, myself.

Also, if you have iWork, you can send an exact facsimile of Apple's iCard using Kyn Drake's kCard templates for Keynote:

http://idisk.mac.com...ard/kCards2.zip



Make your own iCards with PostCard and KeyNote

[Jeter2Fan93]

I have Leopard and I still don't use Mail. The templates don't impress me one bit, and this is just asinine of Apple to suggest MobileMe users use the templates instead of iCards.

[dshan]

Free iCards was the only part of mac.com I ever used. MobileMe now has no redeeming features at all, and I'll never use it. All vendors need to learn that "the cloud" will only work as a free add-on to std apps, not as a seperately chargeable service. Forget your dreams of rental nirvana and give us real software!

[MacSmiley]

Although iCards weren't the only .Mac feature I used (I do like my email sans advertisements and iDisk has more space than Box.net's premium service for less money), however, iCards was a service that added value to our subscriptions and also added that warm, fuzzy feeling towards Apple that was unattainable anyway else.

I see room for another icon here, don't you?



Apple filed a patent last September for group-signed iCards. If Apple does have something up its sleeve for the future, there's no reason the iCards site should have been taken down in the meantime!

C'mon Steve! Even with DIY alternatives, iWant Apple iCards Back!

[batchtaster]

Clearly the demise of iCards is the entire reason why the MobileMe rollout was so rocky.

Did a quick straw poll among 10 die-hard Mac users about if they knew iCards was recently shut down. Typical responses: "I thought that went years ago", "god, who cares?" and "people actually use that?" (not any more I guess).

That was truly the most pointless and frivolous service Apple ever offered, and it's well past time it was axed. However will the world go on, not being able to send a 2 line text message wrapped in a 50KB cutsey template? Human communication has been severely impacted indeed, and the ripples will be felt throughout humanity because sending a picture of a kitty or an autumn tree can no longer be done at the drop of the hat or on a whim.

And thus the amount of pointless garbage mail drops a small fraction of a percent thoughout the world.