I’m still hav­ing trou­ble find­ing an ideal cloud com­put­ing solu­tion. I haven’t writ­ten much recently because Google Docs is just enough of a pain in the ass to get to that I don’t bother with it. Turns out I have to be able to write locally, includ­ing on my phone. So a 100% web-​based solu­tion is out.

For the moment, I’m back to writ­ing in plain text files (not only do I not need word until my third draft, which is more of a revi­sion of the sec­ond than a full draft, but it’s actu­ally a dis­trac­tion deal­ing with ital­ics and word count when I’m try­ing to com­pose) and keep­ing them in sync via Live Mesh. This works, and works well, but the Mesh clients on my net­book and smart­phone chew up a lot more CPU and bat­tery than I’d like.

Rumor has it that Google is going to announce their GDrive cloud stor­age any day now, and that it will pro­vide access from any device. Given that they say the same thing about Google Docs, and Docs is frus­trat­ingly read only on mobile devices, I’m not sure how much to believe them there.

On the PIM side, I’ve ditched hosted Exchange and it’s montly fee (hey, in these trou­bled times, etc.) and opted for Nueva­Sync. This works just like Exchange as far as Win­dows Mobile is con­cerned and gives me “set and for­get” over the air sync to my Google Cal­en­dar and Gmail con­tacts. I’m not one of those “thou­sands of con­tacts in dis­crete cat­e­gories” kind of peo­ple, so Gmail con­tacts is fine for my needs.

I am cur­rently with­out a tasks solu­tion, though. I’ve tried imple­ment­ing GTD for Ever­note, but the Win­dows Mobile client is too lim­ited to really man­age my tasklist in Ever­note on the go. I’ve tried Remem­berTheMilk, but don’t like the web inter­face and don’t like their timed-​sync client for Win­dows Mobile. Google opened up Gmail Tasks to mobile users yes­ter­day, but Opera 9 can only han­dle the basic XHTML client. If Nueva­Sync can bring the same easy sync­ing I get out of Gmail con­tacts to Gmail tasks, that will be a home run. But until that hap­pens, I’m pretty much at a loss.

Back in April when we did the ini­tial tech pre­view release of Live Mesh we empha­sized a vision for how the offer­ing would bring together your world of devices – a start­ing point to deliver on the data, devices, and peo­ple aspects of our vision. With this beta release we are mak­ing another sig­nif­i­cant step toward this goal. In par­tic­u­lar… with this Beta we are pro­vid­ing lim­ited avail­abil­ity of our new Mac and Win­dows Mobile 6 clients – pro­vid­ing users with a wider range of devices that can par­tic­i­pate in their mesh. Later this week as the beta rolls out, access to the Mac client will be pro­vided from the device ring expe­ri­ence at www.mesh.com. Instruc­tions for access­ing the Win­dows Mobile client will be made avail­able at this blog later in the week.

Live Mesh : Wel­come to Beta

This is the miss­ing piece (well, that and a OneNote Mobile that isn’t totally lame) of my mobile data strat­egy. I’ve been using Live Mesh for months, first just my desk­top to the web, then my desk­top through the web to my net­book and back. Just like my Exchange data, I’m secure that any­thing I change in once place will be the same every­where else I access it.

The free­dom this gives me is hard to explain. For my Exchange data, email, cal­en­dar, con­tacts and tasks, it doesn’t mat­ter if I use my desk­top, my net­book or my Treo to access any of it. I’ll use whatever’s most con­ve­nient at the time. I’m writ­ing this post on my desk­top at home because I’m get­ting ready to pod­cast, but I could just as eas­ily post it on my net­book from Chipo­tle (where there is, alas, no WiFi, so I have to tether to the EVDO con­nec­tion on my Treo), or from Mobile Pos­tIt on my Treo lying on the couch. My data is com­pletely inde­pen­dent from the device I hap­pen to use to access it. And now I’ll have the same free­dom with edit­ing doc­u­ments, spread­sheets, sync­ing music and videos to my Treo that I have with my other computers.

This is gonna be big.

Over the past cou­ple weeks I’ve been try­ing a new exper­i­ment. Now that I’ve embraced the “net­book lifestyle,” I thought I’d see what this cloud com­put­ing thing was really all about. While I have Microsoft Office 2007 loaded on my HP Mini-​Note, I thought I’d try Google apps instead.

The way I see it, there’s two dif­fer­ent par­a­digms to use with netbooks.

1. Thin client, or web-​based. Using web-​based appli­ca­tions and liv­ing out of the browser. This has become much more fea­si­ble than it used to be, and oth­ers have made a pretty good go of using only Fire­fox for all their com­put­ing needs. And thanks to Google Gears, you can even work offline (albeit with some pretty sig­nif­i­cant limitations).
2. Thick client, or what used to be called client-​server com­put­ing. Here you use tra­di­tional desk­top soft­ware and either store your data in the cloud or sync your data through the cloud to other PCs.

Tech­ni­cally there is a third option, just using the net­book like any other com­puter and not using net­worked data at all, but where’s the fun in that?

The most pop­u­lar option, at least among the tech­no­rati, is option one. Google’s office suite (Gmail, Docs, Note­book, Cal­en­dar) does a pretty good job of replac­ing heav­ier client-​side apps like Microsoft Office or OpenOf­fice. And if you’re using a com­puter designed to be online all the time, why not use online tools?

Sup­ple­ment­ing Google’s suite with a few addi­tional ser­vices like Remem­ber The Milk for task man­age­ment and ScribeFire’s Fire­fox plu­gin for blog­ging, I tried this out for a week. I even ditched Exchange on my Treo and used GooSync and MilkSync along with Gmail’s IMAP ser­vice to use Google ser­vices on Win­dows Mobile (which works, but not as well as Android, alas). I used Gears to allow offline use in RTM, Docs, etc. And it worked, sorta.

I tried to like it, I really did. And the inte­gra­tion between Google Docs, Note­book and iGoogle is pretty com­pelling. I was able to keep my doc­u­ments online and edit­ing them was fast and easy. I expect I’d like Google Docs a lot more if I was doing any active col­lab­o­ra­tion, it looks really good for that. But the lim­i­ta­tions got to me. You can’t cre­ate a new doc­u­ment in Google Docs when you’re offline, among other things.

Because that’s what really made the deci­sion for me. It’s easy to get online with a net­book, but it’s not a given. I’ve found that WiFi hotspots are far more com­mon that I would have sus­pected, but they’re not every­where. I can tether my net­book to my Treo pretty eas­ily, but that involves a cable (I can’t seem to get it work­ing with Blue­tooth or WiFi, even with PdaNet), which means a sta­ble setup where I’m going to be for a while. For quick work, jot­ting some­thing down quickly (10 min­utes or less) set­ting up a cel­lu­lar inter­net con­nec­tion is too much of a has­sle. And as a result, I wasn’t using my net­book as often as I could have.

If I was using an even smaller net­book, like the Asus eee 700 series with just 4GB of flash and pretty much instant-​on Linux, I’d be more inclined to make web-​based apps work. But I have an XP-​based net­book with a 120GB hard drive. I have the abil­ity to use local stor­age, local soft­ware and the full power of Win­dows. Why not use it along with the best of cloud com­put­ing? (and yes, there is a vision for more, but I’ll get to that in another article)

So instead of liv­ing in the clouds, I’ve got a core group of local soft­ware that ties into the cloud for stor­age and sync, allow­ing me to work offline with no com­pro­mises when I have to, but have all the ben­e­fits of the net when can. I’ll detail my set up soon, but for now, how are you using cloud computing?