2007-03-05 22:34
SyncTogether syncs Macs without .Mac
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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2007-02-21 16:45
GTD application Actiontastic gets online companion: Actionatr
What is 'GTD'?
GTD stands for "Getting Things Done", and is a "work-life management system" and a book by David Allen.
Get the book here, while also helping me out (affiliate link)
Other GTD resources
43 Folders: Getting started with ‘Getting Things Done’
Tracks is a free GTD web app written in Ruby on Rails.
Jon Crosby, developer of GTD application Actiontastic has just announced an upcoming online version: Actionatr
As far as I know, this makes Actiontastic the first Mac GTD application to take its business online.
Of course, things will sync between the two versions. And Crosby apparently thought the same thing I did when the iPhone’s web browser capabilities were announced: This would be perfect for using GTD web applications, as opposed to writing native iPhone applications (which wouldn’t be allowed by Apple anyway).
I have tested Actiontastic just a few minutes, but I didn’t really put my heart into it because of the lack of online access. I can’t use a GTD app on one computer only. But when it goes online at some point in the future, I will definitely try it out.
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