Mac Syncing
posted in Strategy, Software |
In his blog for ZDnet, titled The Apple Core, longtime Apple watcher Jason O’Grady writes about what iTunes can learn from Aperture 1.5. I couldn’t agree more, but I think Jason buried the lead a bit. Apple needs to get serious about syncing.
The first four paragraphs of the post specifically relate to Aperture’s new features. Only then does he get to what I consider the core of his thinking. Jason is spot-on that Apple should extend their digital hub strategy and get serious about syncing, but it shouldn’t be limited to iTunes libraries.
Apple’s iTunes handles syncing with iPods exceedingly well. And iSync makes it relatively easy to keep your calendars and contacts with you too, though I use The Missing Sync to also get iTunes playlists, iPhoto albums and more onto my Treo. And .mac Sync allows me to keep those contacts and calendars — along with bookmarks and mail accounts — syncronized across the web and multiple Macs. But each of these has some serious shortcomings, most notably .mac Sync, which can be slow and unreliable.
Aperture’s “flexible library management” feature, as it’s called on the Apple website, allows you to store your photos in one or more different locations (local or remote hard drives, DVDs, CDs, etc.) and access them all in Aperture, online or offline. In this sense, it works just like Mail.app, in which you can specify an IMAP account, POP account and work on or offline, connecting only to complete certain types of tasks (send/receive, for example). Say I’ve got 1,000s of photos on my home iMac, another collection on my work Mac Pro, and even some stored on archival DVDs. I can still use Aperture on my MacBook Pro while traveling, have it point to all of those libraries and keep metadata (albums, titles, descriptions, location, etc.) and low-res images available at all times. I could then easily drop photos from multiple locations into a single presentation to a client without being connected. Nice.
Nice, but not where I want to be with syncing. What about other types of files, such as Pages documents or Keynote presentations? I work in an office, I often work from home, and I travel extensively. I need an easy-to-use, reliable system for syncing all or particular subsets of data across multiple devices or locations, such as Macs, iPods, phones, and the Web. If I’m on the road, I can use Aperture to drop a photo into a Keynote presentation, even if that photo is actually stored back home on my iMac. But what if a client calls and says she wants to start her next project two weeks earlier than anticipated, and all my files are on my MacBook Pro back at the office, where I won’t be for another week or two?
There are a wide variety of different solutions available for sycning and remote access. Look for upcoming posts on SoonR, which allows me to access my Mac files from my Treo, and the spate of new P2P file sharing services like Pando, which bypasses email for file sharing. But the holy grail of data-device syncronization is a single, simple user interface that allows me to specify what data to keep in sync on which devices. Here’s hoping that the much-anticipated iPhone will lead Apple to also make serious advancements with iSync.
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