Using different computers is nice since I still like a desktop system, yet a laptop is definitely handy. Add a home desktop system into the mix and that means I have three systems I try to keep in sync. My wife also has her own laptop, so she has two systems to sync. There is unfortunately no silver bullet which will take care of all the syncing needs, so I try to deal with the pain points as they come.
I’ve already discussed calendar syncing, and since all my email is accessed via IMAP there aren’t syncing issues (at least not for the messages themselves). I’m a MobileMe (nee .Mac) subscriber so many other things are taken care of for me, even though I only really sync Safari bookmarks and contacts. I use NetNewsWire which already syncs over iDisk, so I’m good there as long as I somehow force a sync before going somewhere else, but I can always use screen sharing to do that if I forget.
I tried syncing Mail rules but ran into a problem with signatures always showing conflicts when syncing. Since my mail rules rarely changed, I just disabled syncing for them (and I don’t really use signatures anyway). I also don’t sync Mail accounts since I only check for mail on my Comcast account from home.
For the other things which one can sync with MobileMe, my workflow doesn’t require that they be synchronized. My dock is different for the different systems, I only have a couple dashboard widgets, and I don’t use Notes.
Web passwords
I used to sync my keychains since it was handy to have Safari user information appear everywhere, but it was inconvenient to not have access to them in Firefox. A while ago I got an offer for a free licence for 1Password from Agile Web Solutions, and I was close enough to web password bliss that I paid for an upgrade. Since 1Password uses the Mac Keychain to store information, syncing is built in. Password generation is really easy to use, but I didn’t start using it until my comfort level with using 1Password was high enough that I didn’t fear it losing information (ever try remembering several 20 character random passwords?) It will even fill in passwords for web sites which tell the browser to not save password information, and doesn’t require an exact URL match as Safari does (potentially causing many keychain entries for each site).
Version 2.9 introduced the Agile Keychain which allows you to store the encrypted data somewhere other than the Apple Keychain. While I could have shared it with my MobileMe iDisk, that really didn’t appeal to me since the choices there are either to require WebDAV (pretty slow) or to mirror my iDisk on local disk (requiring 20gb on each of my systems). Fortunately there are other options and I chose to go with Dropbox which acts like a locally-mirrored iDisk, except it only takes as much disk space as you’re actually using. You get 2gb for free which is plenty; my 1Password Agile Keychain is less than 1.5mb for about 100 entries including previous passwords.
When 1Password enabled non-MobileMe syncing, that was the final hurdle to get my wife’s passwords synced between her two systems (she’s often commented that over the past few months she’s acquired many more accounts than she’s had before). I upgraded 1Password to a family pack license and set up a Dropbox for her. While she’s still getting used to using it, the setup already seems to be useful.
Contacts
Since I currently sync contacts through MobileMe, things are actually OK in that regard. I’m able to sync with my phone, but for some reason I’m unable to sync contacts (or calendars, for that matter) with my iPod. It would be nice to be able to quickly look at my calendar, but it hasn’t been enough of an issue to investigate more (although I did make a few attempts at resetting the sync data with Syncrospector).
The current pain point with contacts is my wife and I need to manually copy items back and forth. One option would be to upload everything to an LDAP server and have us both subscribe, but we wouldn’t be able to just browse contacts since directories in the Address Book application are only searchable. Not syncing to devices would also be a problem.
One possibility would be to sync contacts via my Yahoo account, which is otherwise unused. Unfortunately I’ve had no luck getting that to work, at least yet. Google contacts is another possibility but it seems that while non-iPhone users can edit the Address Book plist file to enable the feature, it works only if you’ve synced an iPod with that computer (not true for all our systems).
I suppose I could also try to put together a sync service which would transfer things via Dropbox folder shared between my wife’s account and mine, but it’d be a lot cleaner if I could get the Yahoo syncing working.
Other
The only other sync thing on the “would be nice” list is to somehow get iGTD syncing between our home system and my wife’s laptop. Looks like iGTD2 will support plugins which would enable that, but development on the new version has stalled since the beginning of the year. We’ll see if things pick up again before too long.
