Being a programmer, I’m exposed to a lot of things that make my life easier. At least, things that can make my life easier. It seems like the programming world has a never-ending goal to seize the pains of managing and maintaining code. Version control, object-orientation, frameworks, abstraction/extraction, etc, all have the common goal to make life easier and more efficient for programmers. This effort shouldn’t stop with programmers.
I don’t know how many people own multiple computers, versus how many try to sync multiple computers. But there’s a big difference. Just because you have multiple computers, doesn’t mean you try and sync them. I’m definitely a sync-er. I like to have everything the same, on all computers I use (even work). The only environment shift I want to experience is relative to hardware (bigger monitor, faster processor, etc.) So many times I’ve wanted to check random things into a version repository, just so I’d have access to the most recent copy across all three computers. For instance, a configuration file for the Rails editor I’m currently using. I don’t want my editor to be different at all. And depending on my ability to fine-tune it exactly the same on each computer (and having to change all three if I change one) doesn’t seem to fit with me. I could always email it to myself, then save it over the original, but you know how that is. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your entire hard drive under version control? So if I randomly delete/add folders and/or files, restructure my folder tree, or whatever, it’s no problem; I’d just run “hd update” on my other hard drive(s) to reflect all of the changes. There are certain pieces to this puzzle (such as Google Browser Sync), but I’m not buying the online file storage to have multiple access points for my files. I still want them to be on my local computer, I just want an easier way to update them. And tagging content on the web helps to define and categorize that content, why can’t I have the ability to tag my files among my computer(s)? Would that not make sense for the very same reasons? Maybe I’m being too irrational, but it seems like there are a lot of options that simply aren’t considered in places where it almost makes the most sense. And yes, I’d complain about something else if that were ever to become a reality.