The Cattery

The Cattery

'N'Sync

16 May 2005
Filed under Mac, Technology, Text

While others have covered the all-over-the-placeness of syncing in Tiger - and I agree with their gripes - I'm quite excited by the longer-term prospects for .Mac as a result of Apple opening up their sync technology to other developers. The first glorious result of this is Transmit 3.2, which, among several Tiger-friendly additions to the software, allows me to synchronise FTP bookmarks between my two computers. In the past, I've been using Chronos's Stickybrain to keep all this information accessible, at least, but being able to sync both my keychains and my Transmit favourites makes it seamless. I'm hoping for a Newsfire update in the near future that will sync my RSS feeds via .Mac, and I imagine Chronos will be able to update Stickybrain to allow proper syncing of its database, rather than having to overwrite one's whole set of notes with a new set.

The Sync technology obviously also paves the way for more comprehensive syncing - Mail messages, key work folders, System Preferences - but I guess at the moment bandwidth and server storage prevent this from being really viable. I can't wait, though.

Views from the Floor

Khoi Vinh says:

You're right, it's very encouraging that Apple has opened up .Mac to third party developers. It's a smart move in that they're basically enlisting these developers to help sell more .Mac subscriptions. One day soon there will be lots of robust synching via .Mac, but for now, things are a mess.

Virginia says:

Yes, I can't see Apple opening up sync to allow people to use ANY old server... but conversely, I've found .Mac to be useful without being a great bargain. This added syncing stuff really makes it very worthwhile.

I guess the mess in syncing has been made in part by Windows users with iPods: Apple wants those people to have the same ability to sync contacts automatically as Mac users have, so they bundle the function in with iTunes where perhaps some kind of preference pane would be better...?

Comments are closed on this entry.

Edit Entry

Categories