Six Software Products in One Year

I use lots of different computers. I have a laptop which goes with me everywhere. I have a desktop at home with a nice monitor and great performance. I have a desktop at one client’s office. Then there’s the backup server, mobile phone and iPod.

I have data that I use on all of these machines. Keeping it all up-to-date everywhere is a hassle.

What I want is a program that will link up all of these different computers and keep my data the same everywhere. If I’m working on my desktop and want to go out and work at a cafe, I should be able to just pick up my laptop and go, and all of my work and all of my email will be right there, completely up to date.

When I go to my client’s office, I want all of my work to be up-to-date and ready to go. If I put some new music on my laptop, I want it to appear on my iPod automatically. If I disappear on a holiday, I still want to have my most crucial emails and contacts available on my mobile phone.

I don’t want my personal emails to be saved on the client’s office computer, because I don’t control it. I don’t want my MP3 collection to be saved on my mobile phone, because it doesn’t have enough space. I don’t want my source code to be saved on my iPod, because I’ll just lose it anyway.

I need some magic to make all of this happen. This is what my file synchronizer will do.

I’m concentrating on syncing a laptop to a desktop right now. That solves my biggest day-to-day hassle - I like to work on my desktop (it’s faster and more pleasant) but I do need the portability afforded my my laptop fairly often. Among the people I’ve spoken to, it’s also their biggest sync-related problem - a lot of people use their laptops for everything (”having two computers is too much of a hassle! I’d rather just have one computer and carry it around with me.“) but hate the performance and the constant reconfiguration hassle (”I have to plug in all of the peripherals and change the screen resolution and the font size and the volume and the network setup and my wallpaper looks bad on the big monitor and then I have to go out again anyway and set it all up again.“).

So that’s the dream. Laptop, desktop. Your stuff is the same on both. Always. You don’t have to think about it or copy files. It just is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.