Think on These Things

One thing I absolutely love about Apple’s OS X is how all the iLife applications seamlessly trade information with one another. Add all your friends to your Address Book and when you want to write an email, you can launch mail, start typing their name and the rest will be auto-filled. I simply find this fantastic. However, it’s always annoyed me how this synchronization of information can’t span multiple computers as well. Well, it can, if you don’t mind paying $100/year for Apple’s .mac service, which is already considered by many to be obsolete. With .mac you can do things like, synchronize mail and contacts and calendars across multiple computers. But why would I pay $100 a year to synchronize such information between my desktop Mac Mini and my PowerBook? It’s a waste of money. Clearly, the .mac service would come in handy if you were synchronizing between home and work computers, but what if your work computer is a notebook which you bring home every day? Also what if your desktop machine were the center of your home office? This is my case. I have a mac mini, which I use for everything while I’m home and a PowerBook that I take with me to school and work. When I add or remove contacts, events, to-do’s, bookmarks, from one computer I’d like to have the changes made on the other. Let’s say I’m out in the school library writing a paper, I get a phone call, some things come up and a few more items are added to me to-do list for the week, I add a couple bookmarks, I write a few e-mail drafts. I add them to iCal/Mail on my PowerBook, and ideally when I come home and set the PowerBook aside to charge, I’d like to synchronize and have all those changes made onto my Mini, where I usually do all my e-mailing and organizing. I’m not going to pay $100 to do this, it seems so obvious, it’s .mac synchronization without the internet. Both of these computers share the same network, why can they not also share such information like contacts, events, and tasks directly? I don’t see any reason why I should pay to synchronize information between computers on the same network. If I knew anything about computer programming, I’d do it myself, but I only have an average grasp over HTML and even that I haven’t used in years. If there are any programmers or Mac aficionados reading this post who know how to accomplish what I seek to achieve, please, please tell me!