I had read about using Box.net with a Mac awhile back. It was nice to see that with this free service you could get 1Gb of space and mount it on your desktop, using it just like a regular mounted drive. With that in mind, I setup a free account earlier this evening.

After getting my account setup, I first have to say that the web design is extremely incredible. I was just awed at the use of colors, rounded edges, gradients…it was just so beautifully crafted, you could tell that people put so much time into this, and to then think that it’s free. I’m contemplating upgrading just to give them some money for such a superb product.

So, the uses of this are pretty limitless in some respects. I have been using the Macfanatic.net server as a way to share files with friends for awhile now, just uploading stuff and then they download it. However, most of my friends aren’t technical enough to use an FTP client to upload stuff back to the server, so that we could share. I wouldn’t want to have to setup more FTP user accounts either.

Box.net is a great way to share stuff then. You can have public files and folders, or make some of them strictly private. With that thought, you can simply share all kinds of stuff easily between users. Another use that is pretty cool and is almost strictly reserved to .Mac users is iCal Publishing.

I’ve never used .Mac and don’t plan on it, even though I get in moods every now and then where I want to buy a subscription and play around with the features. Being able to easily share your iCal calendars is a major plus. Basically, you need to head on over to www.box.net and setup a free account, keeping in mind that if you want to share stuff with people, they’ll need to login and they will require your email (username) and password. Choose something unimportant.

Once you have the account setup, you simply select the calendar you want to share in iCal, select “Publish” and enter the server address of “https://www.box.net/dav” with your username and password. You might have to try using just “http”, but play around with it until you find a way that works. You can read a better set of instructions from the site I found over here.