Synchronicity

I have mentioned in a couple of earlier blogs the issue of synchronizing Macs at various places. This has become a practical issue for me, since I have two (well, actually three) Macs, one at home, one at the office, and one in between, in addition to my iPhone. I spent a lot of time copying files back and forth, making sure that my email was available on both machines when I needed it, and so on. So, finding out ways not to have to do that has been important. And, it seems, important not just to me; everything and everybody seems now to be working on syncing and co-operating, inside or outside what is more or less vaguely called the "cloud". In fact, I have now completely lost track of what applications in my systems are actually syncing and with what. I probably do not use more than a fraction of the options available to me. But let us look at some elements.

Email
I think my first efforts into actually syncing must have been with Eudora back in the 1990s. By checking the option "leave mail on server for ... days", I was able to download incoming email both to my office Mac and my home Mac. I went through various variations of that, whether I would only get "weekend mail" at home and complete storage only at the office, or to organize it in different ways at each machine. But in whichever way, I could not store mail I sent (without copying it to myself), and I spent much time resorting mail into mailboxes, since everything dropped into the In box on both machines.

This changed when I switched from the old mail system (POP) to the IMAP system. These are not Mac programs, but email systems ("protocols") that the server (e.g. your university email system) provides. Today, most servers let you choose, and most, nay every email program will support both; Apple Mail, Eudora (old and new) and others. Webmail is by definition imap, and so are Google Mail and MobileMe. (Check with your university system what options you must set for imap with their setup.)

If you read email on two or more Macs (or PCs, or in a web browser), imap makes things much easier. The point is that all your mail is stored on the server and each Mac accesses the mail stored there. I held off because I thought this meant I could not read old mail when I was offline. But no, a copy of everything is also transferred to each Mac, so you always have access to it, on- or offline. That sounds like "leave on server", the mail is both on the server and on each Mac. But the difference is that the mail you sent, as well as unifinished drafts, is also stored there. And, in particular, your email folder structure is also stored on the server. So once I sort a read email to its mailbox, it will be there whether I read it on the Mac, iPhone or on the web (iPhone Mail has some way to go before multiple mailboxes are really convenient, but anyway).

Imap is for all computer types. What about specific issues for the Mac and (Apple) Mail? Each mail server may have its own issues with imap setup. Mine refuses to let me create folders within folders. Instead, I must create the folder with a subfolder inside in the "On my Mac" section [which is the mail stored locally on your Mac only, you can have such as well], and copy them over to the imap section. I am also not able to sync "To Do" tasks between Macs. Such are neat in that you can point directly to a word in an email, assign completion dates etc., and they sync with iCal. But my iCals sync through MobileMe, while the mail syncs with imap on the campus server. And they do not work together. I may get a task to the second Mac, but then the link to the email is lost (I have discussed this elsewhere).

Mail also has "smart mailboxes", and methods for automatically sorting incoming mail (filters, in Mail called "rules") to specific mailboxes, these are part of the Mail program, not the server's imap system. If you have a MobileMe account (below), you can sync these settings between Macs, so you only need edit a filter once, and it will be used on every Mac. Sadly, that part of MobileMe sync will disappear with that service next summer, iCloud will not sync these mail settings, so you will be back to remembering what criteria you actually set up and repeat them on each Mac.


Address book, Calendar
One result of switching from Eudora to Mail was that I moved into the Apple "all things connected" system, thus having email addresses in Apple's Address Book and using iCal as calendar. Of course it is essential to keep these, and in particular your calendar in sync, not least with your iPhone / iPod-Pad ("iGadget" as David Pogue calls them collectively). There are ways to sync them outside of Apple's system, but these are somewhat convoluted, and while I did try to look into the alternatives, I decided to plunge for Apple's .Mac (now MobileMe) a few years ago, and did not regret the $100 a year I paid. Syncing the calendar and adresses as well as Safari booksmarks was a cinch and has basically worked well. Once, I was napping when I was asked "more than 25% of your addresses have been changed, sync anyway?" and clicked Yes before I realized that I had hardly changed any address lately. The Apple server had crashed, and I had just accepted to delete all my addresses on my home Mac. At the time, I was on sabattical and lived just around the corner from my office, so I jumped on my bike and pedalled furiously over to the office (the Mac there was sleeping, and had thus not synced yet), and in the few seconds delay before the auto-sync began, I forced Address Book to push the still preserved address book there back to the server, and then from there to my home Mac. A bit of panic there (Time Machine would also have saved me), but it is I think the only major crisis I have had for Address book.

There are some issues with iCal on the iPhone, though. I use a couple of calendar derivates (Calvetica for simplicty of entering new appointments, Weekly Calendar for monthly overview), both of which get their data from the built-in iPhone calender, but they do not always sync perfectly. Sometimes I have to wiggle quite a bit to get an item sent from the iPhone to the Mac or the other way, and sometimes an item that is properly edited on the Mac appears as "New item" on the iPhone, and is then copied back as New item to iCal! Never found out exactly what happens, and the issue is mostly (as I recall) iPhone to Mac, not Mac to Mac.

Anyway, this requires MobileMe which is going away to become iCloud (opened last month). This system only works with Lion, and as I will try to avoid Lion as long as I can, at least while MobileMe lasts (next June), I wondered if I also had to keep off upgrading my iPhone to iOS 5, as that uses iCloud. Apple does not say if you can still use MobileMe with iOS 5, but after searching on the web, user experiences seem to be that you can. I have not done it yet, but it appears thus I can upgrade the iPhone to iOS 5, and still have it sync with my Snow Leopards using MobileMe. Until next summer.


Files: iDisk and DropBox
So much for the small and automatic stuff, the next Big Thing is the documents we are working on. Perhaps you do different things at home than at the office, but like most academics I take stuff home to work on in the weekends or evenings. From floppy disks, I graduated to saving a copy of relevant documents to some online server and then copying back from there to the other Mac. For this, I could use my campus server, but once I had MobileMe, I could access Apple's iDisk as the go-between. It wasn't very fast, and of course you had to remember to copy back and forth and accrued many versions of the files that could be confusing. Another MobileMe feature, which I rather like, is Back to my Mac, which allows me to access my office Mac directly from my home Mac (and vice versa): I can see it as a volume in Finder and copy directly back and forth (so I am certain I get the latest version), or even see the actual desktop and operate the remote Mac as if I am in front of it. Very canny, but it works only under certain network conditions, and not if the remote Mac is sleeping.


Anyway, as iDisk is also going away with MobileMe, as discussed earlier, I looked at alternatives, and I made a great discovery, which has actually changed fairly dramatically how I use the computer, particularly the home/office situation: DropBox. This is a remote service, free for regular users, which does basically only one thing: You (or it, actually) assign a folder on your Mac to be the DropBox folder. Anything you put in there is continuously and automatically copied to the DropBox server, and immediately synced back to the similar DropBox folder on your other Mac(s). The point is that, the syncing apart, the DropBox folder is just a regular folder on your hard disk, it is not on a remote machine (like iDisk folders). So, working with documents there is just like in any other folder (and they are of course still on your Mac whether you are on- or offline). Thus, I have put all my Filemaker databases into the DropBox folder as well as any paper or other document I am working on. Saving, opening etc. is just as quick as if it was in any other folder, but the document is immediately (a split second) identical on the other Macs, so I can just get up from one Mac, sit down in front of the other, and continue working as I left off. It just works, as Steve said. Goodbye all worries about "am I actually editing the current version now?"

The only thing to remember is to save (and preferably close) the document before you leave the first Mac; if both machines have unsaved changes to the same doc, DropBox will (so they say, have not tried) notice this and save each as a separate copy, so you have to figure out which is which. But it should be second nature anyway to save the file you work on when you leave the Mac.

DropBox also works as an extra backup, because you then have separate copies on each Mac as well as on their server in case one Mac falls into the sea, and they there also keep older versions a bit like a surrogate TimeMachine. Or even better: A colleague of mine soaked her iBook with water the other day. Clean water, so she just left it to dry out and it worked fine (well, the screen sloshed a bit). But she needed her files on that particular day while it was drying. She had a backup with TimeMachine on a TimeCapsule, but what good was that? We realized that TimeMachine is fairly restrictive. It will restore old files to the original Mac only, or to a direct clone such as a fresh hard disk. In our case, we wanted to access her files from another Mac, using her account name and password, but the TimeCapsule would not hear of it. When we tried to connect to the capsule from another Mac with her identical account settings, it saw just the hardware Mac, not the account, as a new client (which is logical, since Time Machine of course also backs up system settings, not just account data, and the system was different). Maybe if we had TimeMachine on a physically connected hard drive rather than the wifi Time Capsule, we could have accessed the volume directly, but that was not an option. Here DropBox would have been a better solution, had her files had been on that server, she could have just picked it up from a web browser.

That is because you can also access your DropBox folder on the web, so you can get to your files there in a browser on any Mac or PC and copy to that machine, as well as to your iGadget. There is a DropBox app on the iPhone, in it you can read but not edit the file, and only the basic document types are supported for reading, thus not e.g. FileMaker databases. But it can "send" the DropBox file to other apps that allow you to open and edit; thus my databases (now all on DropBox, remember) can be downloaded and passed on to the FileMaker Go app (the "official" Filemaker for iPhone), which opens it normally. Of course, that is then a separate copy and changes made to the file are not reflected back to DropBox; I would have to transfer the file back to a Mac via iTunes, but still, being able to access to all my databases anywhere is great, even if just for reference (have I actually bought this book I see in the bookstore? Ah yes, I did.)
            For example, I have an app ShowAnytime which allows me to display PowerPoints directly on a VGA screen from the iPhone, without using a PC or Mac. It can pick up files from my DropBox folder, so if I am on the road and something happens to the provided PC (which it often does), I can instead just connect my iPhone to the video cannon, download the file I left at the office (in the DropBox folder). Without having to plan it in advance, just as long as I have the iPhone-to-VGA cable with me in my backpack (it never leaves).
          I said DropBox is free, that gives you 2 gigabytes storage, you can get more with a subscription, but 2GB for current projects and all my Filemaker stuff is enough for me. There are other similar solutions, but I am quite happy with Dropbox.

Notes and stuff: Evernote
Those are the big things. But then there are piles and piles of stuff that also syncs, as I said, I am not sure I remember all accounts I have any more. The blog you are reading is edited in Blogspot, which syncs my draft to my account with them, so I can write on it anywhere (that is why they get so long). Blogspot is part of the Google empire, which is also heavy on syncing if you have a Gmail account (gives you access to everything). If you do not need very advanced word processing, you can write your files in GoogleDocs, from anywhere.
There is a GoogleDocs app from iPhone, I used instead NoteMaster which syncs back and forth with GoogleDocs, but really, I don't actually write anything on the iPhone. Perhaps more useful on an iPad, but I have not made that leap.
         I have earlier discussed creating a newsstream ("Make your own newspaper") with the RSS system. This does not have built-in syncing (so you can create different "newspapers" on different Macs), but many apps and programs use, again, Google as a repository: You set up your subscriptions in Google Reader, and then other apps sync your settings (and read status and so on) from Google, so they are all on the same page. I use Reeder both on iPhone and Mac, but there are many others who also sync with Google.
        I have also discussed the "ToDo-list" issue, where syncing was an issue. I have for the moment stayed with WunderList that I mentioned there, but maybe look into the Omni alternative suggested by a comment, when I get back to that.
         Specifically for academic purposes, I have also elsewhere discussed citation and bibliography software, that is alternatives to EndNote, and suggested the program Sente, which is what I mostly use. This also syncs my bibliographic database to its server, so that when I add a title at home, I have also access to it at the office. Several other alternatives also do this. It has worked fine so far.

Evernote
One program that has been much recommended, but which I initially didn't quite see my need for, was Evernote. It is not a to-do thing, but a place to write and store notes of pretty much any kind, and, again, synced between computers, and also accessible on the web (so you can get to your notes from any PC or Mac). I am sure that could be used for pretty much any purpose, but I couldn't quite think up what I would need it for.
             However, I came up with one particular very limited purpose, and since it is also free, I have started using it for just that: Storing web pages. There are of course many specified services for this, like Instapaper and others (and in the latest version of Safari, more of which in a moment), but the idea for me was not to find a way to delay reading web pages - they pile up, and if I can't read a page now, I will never get the time.
             But, at infrequent intervals I come across references to books I might like to buy at Amazon (or elsewhere). I can't buy everything the moment I see them, so the ideas must be stored to be prioritized later (and not in Amazon's wish list, please). I actually began creating Safari bookmarks for each Amazon page, but that was cumbersome. Perhaps Evernote could do this for me.
It did: You install the app, and it puts an elephant icon in the Safari toolbar. Click on the elephant, and the current web page is stored to your notebook (and thus synced between your Macs, of course). You can structure the entries as you like (Must buy, Perhaps later, Maybe not) and so on. This is also useful for newspaper cuttings which I have read, but would like to keep. Unlike Safari 5, Evernote saves the actual page, not just the link (but also the link, if you want to go back to the Amazon page), so you have the article even if the newspaper has removed it. So far, that has been useful enough for me to make me stop upgrading Safari for the moment.

Because, this "web clipper" was excellent in Safari up and until the latest Safari upgrade a few weeks back. Then it broke down; Safari has done something so the elephant icon no longer works. Happily, I read a warning about this before being asked to upgrade from Safari 5.0 (OK) to 5.1 (not OK). If you have already dutifully done what Apple told you and installed a full system upgrade in the last month or two, then unfortunately, the train has passed (you can upgrade the other elements, just deselect Safari). A few days ago, Evernote released a new "extension" for Safari that should supposedly restore the web clipping function, but that did not work at all for me with Safari 5.1 under OS 10.6.8. Maybe it is made only for Lion. Anyway, it wasn't quite the same thing. The original extension copies the web page directly to Evernote on your Mac (from where it is synced later to the server). The new cannot do that, it instead copies the page to the server, and it is later synced back to your Evernote collection. In any case, it didn't do anything of the sort, it simply refused to load or do anything.
         There is another "recommended" option, which is to set up an Evernote bookmark in Safari. That does work in Safari 5.1, and again copies the web page to your account on the Evernote server. But while the original web clipper gave you a perfect copy of the page, the bookmark does not. Most of the html disappears; you may get the text (with some code around it), but not all images etc. So, if you want Evernote to clip web pages, hold back on upgrading Safari beyond 5.0. (I was able to downgrade by dragging a copy of Safari 5.0 from another Mac back to the one I had upgraded. No, Time Machine did not work here either, it reinstalled something that was not an application, just a folder.)

Will it iCloud over?
So what about the new Apple iCloud? As mentioned, I have kept off because of the Lion requirement. To me just now it seems to be a step backwards rather than forward. It is free, of course, while MobileMe was subscription, but otherwise it does less. Dropbox is a vast improvement over iDisk, and the other third-party syncs probably do much of what iCloud can do. For me, syncing iCal and Address Book is very important, in particular the calendar, and for the moment it seems iCloud will do that more easily than other options, so I will probably move over when MobileMe closes down and/or I have to go to Lion anyway. Unless I can find a better solution for iCal by that time. I was enthusiastic about the "pick up where you left on the other machine" that iCloud promised for iWork documents, but it was only for Apple's own programs, and I now already have that and better in DropBox. But, again, iCould is free, so using it for iCal alone will be OK.

What other syncing software do I have? iSync of course, but for my purpose, it was only used for linking mobile phones, it is not relevant for my iPhone, but I used it for my old Nokia. Then there is the paraphernalia of social networking things that evidently sync, they are often actually web services, not Mac programs, but several of them have corresponding Mac programs that do pretty much the same thing as the web site, such as Skype, Spotify, Wimp, Twitter (for me: Twitterific) and others have indpendent apps for Mac as well as iPhone. For all these, and for Facebook etc., you can of course just as easily use your regular browser.

Keeping track of the account names and passwords for all these services are another matter. Some log you on automatically, or keep you logged in for long periods of time, so you should be aware of who can access your computer(s). For others, you must find your own system of how to remember it all. But in any case, while you should perhaps not keep your head in the cloud, you can keep pretty much everything on your Mac in some cloud or other by now. Even without the iCloud.