SyncTogether syncs Macs without .Mac
Inspired by this new software product, I look into my multiple Mac setup and come to an unexpected conclusion.
Posted on 2007-03-05 22:34 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
Mark/Space has released SyncTogether, which syncs Address Books, Mail settings, iCal and other SyncServices data between multiple Macs.
Personally I’m on three different Macs all the time: Work, G5 at home and iBook G4 on the road/rails. But I’ve never used iCal, Mail, Address Book or Safari to any sort of extent, because I use Entourage (work email), Thunderbird (private email) and Firefox (for almost everything).
SyncTogether looks like such a promising concept that I’m seriously considering switching to Sync Services enabled application. There are several problems with this, however.
Safari won’t ever take over for Firefox on any of my Macs, but then again, there’s Foxmarks, which works flawlessly for me. And I don’t use bookmarks for much other than the Personal Toolbar Folder. For other bookmarks I use del.icio.us.
For work email, with their huge attachments, Entourage really is the best available Mac email client. Thunderbird sucks when it comes to emails with big attachments, but I like it in most other respects, especially because its good junk mail filtering (props to my workplace’s firewall — I never get junk at work), so I use that for private email accounts. At least I like it better than Mail, which never hit home with me.
Might it be worth switching from Entourage and Thunderbird to a one-stop solution in Mail, which would sync across all my Macs? How does Mail handle big attachments? From what I understand, Mail’s junk filters should also be pretty good. And then there are interesting Mail plugins like MailTags, integration with applications like Actiontastic and so on (for Getting Things Done).
The other day I just realized that all my three Macs were running Thunderbird 1.0.something, and that I hadn’t been wondering why I hadn’t seen any automatic updates happening with it. So I had to upgrade all three copies. And just yesterday I spent some time reordering of my email accounts by manually editing Thunderbird’s prefs.js file on my G5, a task that was not very easy and not something I want to repeat two more times.
And so I come to realize that Thunderbird, even at version 1.5, isn’t a very streamlined application yet, and that I might be better off running Mail. I’m running Imap exclusively anyhow, so it’s not like it’s a big problem switching back if it shouldn’t work out.
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