Wednesday, December 31, 2003 |
16:08 - Underheralded Feature
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I just wanted to say, for the record, that I have become helplessly addicted to the local-sync iDisk feature of Panther.
It's not the sexiest facet of the system, not by a long shot; it doesn't hold a candle to Exposé, for example. It's also not available to everybody, requiring as it does a .Mac account. But that said, it's gotten to the point where I can hardly imagine what it was like without the feature available to me, even when I'm not using it. Something psychological-- a self-assurance thing.
See, here's the deal. You've got multiple Macs-- a desktop G5, a laptop, and an iMac at work. You turn on local iDisk synchronization on all of them. Then, you start working on some text document, some piece of writing that you want to be able to open up no matter where you are and tap away on it. Where do you keep it? Well, just toss it into the local iDisk.
This has two effects. First, the document gets backed up onto the central iDisk server, where it's protected against any kind of hardware failure (no matter what kind of backup/recovery system you've got for your Macs, you can be sure that the .Mac servers have a better one). And second, your other two machines-- provided they have a Net connection-- do a periodic ping of the server, discover that there are changes to sync to, and the document is published to their own local disks.
So you then go home, pick up your laptop, and head to the park (where there is no network). Open it up, and the document's right there on your local disk. Tap away on it for a few minutes; save the file. Go home. Put the laptop on the network, let it sync. Then go to your G5. Open up the same document. It's all up-to-date.
These days, this is how I do all my book-related work. During PDF review, I downloaded all the galleys to my iMac at work, and stuffed them all into my iDisk. I waited for them to be synchronized over to the iBook, and then grabbed it up and headed north to no-network land, where I spent the long dark Christmas Eve hours reviewing them and adding comments to a little text file I was keeping. When I went home the following evening, I hooked the iBook back up to the network, and voilá-- all the changes were published back to my G5, and backed-up on .Mac.
It's all seamless and invisible, too. No user input necessary, aside from moving the files into and out of the iDisk itself, and making sure to save the files to trigger a sync. (There's also a "force sync" button next to the iDisk in the Finder, so you don't have to wait for the periodic sync on your other machines for them to get up-to-date.) Along with iSync, which keeps all your Address Book contacts and Safari bookmarks and calendar items synchronized across all your machines and backed up on .Mac, the iDisk does the same for your important files.
All hail iDisk, Maker Easier of My Life.
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