JeffKirvin.net

I have an iPhone, a net­book and a multi-​monitor desk­top. And for most tasks, it really doesn’t mat­ter which one I use because can get to all the same data from all three.

I tried doing the web-​app thing. I really did. Given that my net­book is a pre-​Atom HP 2133 with a VIA CPU that I think is actu­ally pow­ered by ham­sters, I tried liv­ing in the browser, turn­ing Chrome into a poor man’s Google ChromeOS. I even went as far as to cre­ate “app” short­cuts for Google Cal­en­dar, Gmail, etc. so I could launch them directly from my taskbar. It just didn’t work. I didn’t fully grok why it didn’t work for me until I read Ben Ward’s trea­tise on what the “web” really means:

If you reach the point of build­ing a browser-​based appli­ca­tion that you depend on so many pro­pri­etary enhance­ments that your users can only access it using Google Chrome, I think you’ve picked the wrong plat­form. If you want to built the most amaz­ing user inter­face, you will need to use native plat­forms. A sin­gle vendor’s benev­o­lent cura­tion of their frame­work will always out­pace the col­lab­o­ra­tive, inter­op­er­a­ble devel­op­ments of the web, whether it’s locked in a stan­dards process or not. When they do a good job (like Apple have with Cocoa­Touch) their plat­form will suc­ceed. But the web will always be the canon­i­cal source of infor­ma­tion and rela­tion­ships. That’s what it was built for. Blog­ging at length about how much the device APIs suck won’t ever undo that, nor change the fact that turn­ing HTML in a rich appli­ca­tion dialect is still a very new idea.

So how does a Win­dows user (in my case, but you’ll see that most of the tools I out­line below are cross-​platform and should work just as well for Mac/​Linux peo­ple) use native desk­top apps to get the supe­rior user inter­face and still keep the “I’ll use what­ever com­puter I hap­pen to have on hand, thanks” free­dom of web apps? It’s actu­ally not all that hard. My pro­grams may reside on my var­i­ous com­put­ers, but my data, that lives in the cloud.

Files, you needs them

The first key to the solu­tion is Drop­box. This is where all my dis­crete files live. All of my doc­u­ments, spread­sheets, images, and I’m think­ing about even music. For free, you get 2GB of stor­age on the web. Any file or folder you put in your spe­cial “My Drop­box” folder gets synced auto­mat­i­cally every time it is changed It’s pass­word pro­tected, and only stuff you delib­er­ately put in the “Pub­lic” folder is vis­i­ble to oth­ers unless you explic­itly share it with some­one, and then only they can see it.

What makes Drop­box bet­ter than Live Mesh, Box.net or any of the other cloud stor­age solu­tions out there? In short, it just works. You install the Drop­box client, it runs silently in the back­ground and syncs files to and from the cloud quickly and reli­ably. It only syncs the parts of files that have changed, so even sync­ing big files is quick and painless.

But what really makes Drop­box shine is how it inte­grates with other ser­vices. I keep all my writ­ing stuff in Drop­box in Word and Excel for­mats. Not only do I know these files will be there and up to date whether I’m on my desk­top or my net­book, but I also have the abil­ity to edit them in place with Doc­u­ments To Go (or Quick­Of­fice Con­nect) on my iPhone — and even­tu­ally, my iPad. I know any changes I make will be there and wait­ing for me the next time I access them in Microsoft Office on my Win­dows machines.

Bonus Advanced Geek­ery: Vista and Win­dows 7 sup­port hardlinks and junc­tions. These are sim­i­lar to short­cuts, but embed­ded deeper into the sys­tem. While a short­cut is a pointer to a file, to appli­ca­tions — like Drop­box — a hardlink is the file (junc­tions are to fold­ers what hardlinks are to files). So you can cre­ate hardlinks and junc­tions to files and fold­ers out­side your Drop­box folder and still have them sync to the cloud. See the icons with the chain­link over­lays in the screen­shot? Those are junc­tions. You can cre­ate these man­u­ally from the com­mand line or down­load this nifty free­ware to cre­ate them in Win­dows Explorer like you man­age all your other files. I have my doc­u­ments and pic­tures fold­ers linked this way, so most of the time I just inter­act with files in their “nor­mal” loca­tions and kind of for­get my Drop­box folder exists. (There is another, sim­pler way to do this, but it only allows sync­ing fold­ers to Drop­box, not indi­vid­ual files, so I pre­fer the first method.)

Drop­box is free if you need any­thing up to 2GB of stor­age. Upping that to 50GB is $9.99/month or $99.99/year, and 100GB is $19.99/month or $199.99/year.

As good as Drop­box is, it only pro­tects what you put in it. For every­thing else on my hard drive, I use Car­bonite. This is less cloud stor­age than cloud backup. Car­bonite backs up what­ever you tell it to, with no size limit, to a backup store in the cloud. Files are dou­ble AES encrypted, and even the admins at Car­bonite can’t tell what is in the files you back up. While all my doc­u­ments are safe in Drop­box if my home 1TB hard­drive should fail, my entire iTunes libarary — music, TV shows and movies that Apple won’t let me redown­load for free — are safe in Car­bonite. $54.95 for a year, and well worth the peace of mind.

There’s more to life than files

A lot of your data doesn’t exist as dis­crete files. You have email, cal­en­dar events, con­tacts, book­marks, pass­words and all kinds of other “stuff” to keep track of. And in most cases, you can use desk­top tools to access these while still keep­ing the data out on the inter­nets where you can get to it from anywhere.

The first tool for this is Google Chrome. I know I said above that I didn’t use web apps much, but Chrome has some pretty use­ful fea­tures in an of itself. (I should note here that just about all the cool fea­tures in Chrome can be repli­cated on Fire­fox by using exten­sions, but I’ve found that Fire­fox has an “exten­sion event hori­zon” beyond which the browser is too slow, bloated and crash-​prone to use. Chrome does what I want out of the box, and even though it sup­ports exten­sions too, I haven’t had to install any.) In par­tic­u­lar for our pur­poses here, it can sync book­marks and pass­words between com­put­ers. Set­ting this up is as sim­ple as click­ing the Tools menu, then Sync and sign­ing in with your Google account name. That takes care of book­marks and web passwords.

Next up, email and all that other “Out­look” stuff. I use Mozilla Thun­der­bird with a cou­ple of exten­sions. It’s slower than I’d like, but that could be a sign that I need to get a beefier CPU. (The single-​core AMD CPU on my desk­top dates back to 2005, and my net­book runs on a VIA proces­sor that’s a LOT slower than an Intel Atom.) Thun­der­bird itself is pretty easy to set up to sync with Gmail’s IMAP pro­to­col, which gives you two-​way sync for mes­sages and fold­ers. Add an exten­sion called Zin­dus, and you can sync your Google con­tacts as well.

But where Thun­der­bird really shines is when you add an exten­sion called Light­ning. This Thun­der­bird exten­sion is the offi­cial suc­ces­sor to Mozilla’s stand­alone cal­en­dar app Sun­bird. It’s basi­cally Sun­bird inte­grated into Thun­der­bird. In addi­tion to the tabs you already have in Thun­der­bird for mail, you now have cal­en­dar and task tabs well, and a cal­en­dar side­bar off to the right of your main mes­sage pane. Get­ting this to sync with Google cal­en­dar is a lit­tle tricky, espe­cially if you have a lot of cal­en­dars to sync, but once it’s set up it works pretty well.

Given how much goes into get­ting Thunderbird/​Lightning set up and work­ing prop­erly, you want to use the free­ware MozBackup to back up your set­tings once you get it the way you like it. Put that back up file in your Drop­box, and then after you install Thun­der­bird on another PC, just “restore” and it will install all the exten­sions and con­fig­ure every­thing for you.

The last piece you need for total desktop/​cloud inte­gra­tion is Ever­note. I’ve talked at length about Ever­note before, so let’s just say it’s where every­thing that doesn’t fit any­where else goes. Data lives in the cloud, excel­lent client apps for Win­dows, Mac, iPhone, iPad.

Other… Stuff

Of course, there are other things you might need to do that are web-​oriented, but you’d rather use desk­top tools if you can.

For blog­ging, I use Win­dows Live Writer. Tech­ni­cally, I could just use Word 2007 on doc­u­ments in my Drop­box for this, but Writer is designed for blog­ging and is a bit eas­ier to work with, espe­cially when it comes to tag­ging posts, delayed pub­li­ca­tion dates — this arti­cle will post at 8am Moun­tain on a Mon­day morn­ing, at which time I will likely be out for a walk — and other metablog­ging stuff. I’ve only used it for Word­Press, but it seems to work really well for just about any blog.

Twit­ter. Ah, Twit­ter. The sad thing about Twit­ter is that I used to use their web­site for read­ing and writ­ing tweets, but they’ve added so much JavaScript crap to it that I now pre­fer native Twit­ter clients to their web inter­face. There are sev­eral native Win­dows clients — not Adobe Air apps — for Twit­ter, and some of them, like Blu, are gor­geous exam­ples of what the Win­dows user inter­face is really capa­ble of. But for day to day twit­ter­ing — both tweet­ing and read­ing tweets — I pre­fer Seesmic for Win­dows. Again, this isn’t the Seesmic Air ver­sion, it’s the native Win­dows client. Not only does this give me the fancy schmancy Aero glass effects, but it’s lighter and faster than any­thing run­ning in a runtime.

For music, the options used to be a lot bet­ter than they are now. I used to use LaLa to upload my iTunes library and stream it from any­where, but Apple bought them and is shut­ting LaLa down. I used to use Sim­plify Music 2 to stream music directly from my desk­top over the net to any­where, but that is shut­ting down too. For now, the best I can do is Pan­dora. I paid the $36 a year for Pan­dora One, which gives me higher bitrate music, unlim­ited lis­ten­ing — ver­sus the 40 hours a month I prob­a­bly wouldn’t hit any­way — and most impor­tantly, no ads. I’ll prob­a­bly also install iTunes even­tu­ally on my wee net­book for library shar­ing, but there’s no rush. I’m kinda hol­ing that Apple will inte­grate LaLa’s stream­ing into the iTunes 10 they inevitably release along with the iPhone HD in June or the next gen­er­a­tion iPods this fall.

When In Doubt, Remote

Some­times, there is just no sub­sti­tute for going back to the “mothership” — my desk­top PC. While my data is as cloud-​based as I can get it and indi­vid­ual com­put­ers have been some­what abstracted out, some things, like man­ag­ing ebooks in Cal­i­bre or my iTunes library, have to be done on the desk­top. (Yes, I know I should be able to use Drop­box to man­age my Cal­i­bre library from mul­ti­ple loca­tions, but I have not been able to get this to work.) For this, I use two dif­fer­ent tools.

When I’m at home on my net­book, I just use Win­dows Remote Desk­top. It’s fast and allows me to use my net­book as though it was my desk­top. The expe­ri­ence is so fluid, in fact, that I use a dif­fer­ent color for Aero glass on my desk­top than I do on my net­book so I can tell at a glance which one I’m using.

When I’m on the go, I use Log­MeIn. This gives me the abil­ity to remote into my desk­top from any web-​enabled PC with­out pay­ing a monthly fee. When I get my iPad, I’ll go ahead and spring for the $30 to buy Log­MeIn Igni­tion, which will allow me to con­trol my desk­top via the XGA touch­screen of the iPad. When you con­sider how much of my data is auto­mat­i­cally and instantly repli­cated on all of my com­put­ing devices, this also over­comes many of the objec­tions to the iPad for not being a “real” com­puter. When I need a “real” PC, I can just remote into my desk­top from the iPad and fin­ish up what­ever I need to do, then go back to the iPad.