
UPDATE #4 It’s 2012, and this project is still alive, although I haven’t worked on lipsync as much as I should. I want to, and have new ideas to implement and try out in the next few months. The two way sharing is a bit hacky, and I don’t like it, the installer creates a cronjob: that checks for server changes to sync back every minute – and it tries to avoid conflicts by not running if a sync the other way is happening. Yes, if you’re using 2 computers at once it could get confused, but so far, it’s pretty good – but something I want to improve. I’m also very interested in ownCloud and using remote storage auth protocol like Unhosted proposes – these are two things I’d love to integrate into lipsync over the next few months. I really think having something that is all owned by the user, and in full control of the user, is still the ultimate way. Watch the lipsync.it site for more details, thanks.
UPDATE #3: Ok, a long, overdue update on this project. I’ve worked on the next version of this ideal that I encourage everyone to checkout and try for themselves. You can get it on Github, and the project’s name is lipsync. My goal is to make something that is trivial for anyone to setup and use, providing them a ‘Dropbox-like’ experience. As before I’ve focused on the backend, server side, part of the game to get that working, but would be happy to work with anyone that wanted to work on a GUI, or integrate this with existing projects, such as Sparkleshare, which seems to have a great GUI, but a backend that relies on things like Github for storage. So give it a look and remember, the more feedback the better; and as always don’t worry about offending me! Thanks.
UPDATE #2: There was a big influx of new hits/posts on this article last week thanks to Lifehacker Australia linking to it, plus they even came up with a pretty sweet logo. It’s very cool that so many are (still) interested in this project – and that’s what it has become; a project. I’ll be releasing code to setup a complete command-line Dropbox like implementation on Linux in about a week. Code will be hosted on github.com and I’m hoping it will spur others to work on cross platform front-ends to talk to it. So far the technology is there, I’m just using what others have built, it’s just a matter of hooking it all up! After all, why reinvent the wheel? (not that I could
) Thanks again for all the comments and support!
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this, and the Reddit thread, as it has provided some great ideas building off of my concept. I’m starting to rethink about how we could have version control on top of things, and I’ll update things when I have more to share. Also, does anyone have iFolder (thanks for the proper link salubrium) working? It looks like you need SUSE Linux, which I don’t have access to, plus I know most Novell projects need a *ton* of Mono dependencies installed to have any of their stuff working, at least on the server side; but it sounds like they have Mac, Linux and Windows clients, which is encouraging. While for my needs something a bit more ‘close to the bone’ (as below) might be better for the server side, having it be inter-operable with something like iFolder could provide a lot more functionality for others.
First off, if you haven’t tried Dropbox, you should check it out; sync all of your computers via the Dropbox servers, their basic free service gives you 2Gigs of space and works cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). I use it daily at home and work, and just having a live backup of my main data for my work workstation, my home netbook, and any other computer I need to login to is a huge win. Plus, I have various ‘shared’ folders that distribute certain data to certain users that I’ve granted access to, this means work details can be updated and automatically distributed to the folks I want to review/use the data. I recommend everyone try it out, and see how useful it is, it’s turned into a game changer for me. So a few months ago they made headlines on supporting Linux as they released the client as open source. While this got hopes up for many, it was only the client that was open source, the server is still proprietary. While slightly disappointing, this is fine, they’re a company trying to make money. I don’t fault them for this, it’s just that a free, portable service like that would be a killer app.