Hopscotch
In reviewing my Organization Smackdown post I realized there's one underlying theme with all of these problems: it's not easy to have things available both offline and online.
What would be ideal is a way to automatically and invisibly (that's important) sync all of my PIM-like programs and websites together. I shouldn't have to think about it. I should be able to set up a folder on my SFTP site, tell these programs to store their data there in addition to my local drive, and voila. A program should then store any changes locally before it does it remotely... and let me know (via Growl? Email?) if it fails.
I should then be able to access that file... which would be an open format, of course... on another computer via a program/SFTP combo or directly via a web interface. I shouldn't have to download these files to work with them unless I'm explicitly using another program on another computer.
Let's use RSS as an example, since OPML has a lot of what I'm looking for (although I'm not sure if it stores article state - read/unread... I don't think so, but I'm ignorant about that.) At home I use NNW and have a cronjob set to quit the program at 8am every weekday before I get on the train. This is done so it will force a sync up to FTP, and also so I don't have two newsreaders grabbing stuff all day. Ideally I shouldn't need to quit the program to force a sync.
At this point, I should have an OPMLish file on my server. I should be able to go to any computer, use a web-based reader (Google Reader), and tell it to always use that same OPML file.
Likewise I should be able to go to work, fire up NNW, and have it grab that same OPML file as its subscription list.
I can understand and appreciate the programming challenge behind this: what happens when the files don't sync? What if I decide to unsubscribe from 50 feeds at Google Reader? Well, I should be asked about that. I should also be able to say that all of my changes from source X are gospel - ie, if I change something at NNW at work, always accept those changes.
This sounds more and more like a system-level service to me. It would be a ridiculous task to build into every piece of software. It seems that .Mac provides some of these tools but everything I've read about syncing with .Mac suggests it's crap. That's too bad.
What's needed is a platform and program agnostic sync mechanism that can fool programs into thinking they're working with a local file when it's really a remote one, yet fallback to a local file if something fails.
In the meantime, I need to live with this silly game of hopscotch. Too bad.
