Going Multiplatform
2012-06-13 by Brady Prigge
In my last post I mentioned a simple bookmarking issue that came up due to the fact that I liked to work on both a Mac as well as a PC. As I started doing more work on stockexplorer.net on multiple platforms I ran into a few more as well.
I'm a bit of an organizational freak and always liked to have a text file that documents the status of a project. I've been doing this since college and since then I have been using the excellent "Tasks" feature in Outlook to accomplish that. This always worked because I've always had a PC with Outlook to work with an usually a PDA or phone that could sync with outlook as well - useful when an idea pops into my head and I am away from the desk.
Fast forward however to the year 2012 where I only have one machine with Outlook (my desktop PC) and absolutely nothing syncing with it. Truth be told since Apple unveiled iCloud I have not been doing any type of manual syncing whatsoever. I wanted to continue with this carefree cloud syncing but still enjoy the benefits I had with Outlook plus syncing. Apple is starting to do things like this but it is not even close to being there. Take notes for example: you can edit notes on an iPhone or a Mac with Mail.app using your iCloud account, but there is no way to edit these notes from a PC, despite the fact that you can READ the notes on Apple's iCloud website.
I looked at a lot of different options for having easily accessible and editable documents, tasks and notes. Some of these options included Dropbox and a bunch of similar file-syncing solutions including Microsoft's. I thought about third-party iPhone/Mac/PC applications as well. But in the end the solution that did everything I wanted was Google Documents + Google Drive. Google Documents are editable on any platform including the iPhone which makes it perfect for keeping track of project statuses and tasks. And Google Drive makes any type of file in a centralized location (Google's "cloud") accessible from any machine - including file types which are NOT handled by Google documents. This means I can work on photoshop, css and html files on either of my PCs or my mac and all of these files are always up-to-date thanks to Google's "Drive Sync" application for both Mac and PC. I can even view the .psd files from any web browser!
I've only been working this way for about a week, but things have been going smoothly and I've been enjoying my multi-platform nirvana so far. If things fall apart or I decide to go another direction, I'll post here about it. Thanks for reading.