Monday, 24 November 2008

Omnifocus + iPhone + JungleDisk Synching

Ok so no posts for a while as I've been tragically too busy with *shock* real work. Real work as opposed to playing around with new SDKs and APIs and devices. Sad, I know...

One recent technical achievement that I have made (perhaps 'achievement' is overstating it) is finally getting my act sorted out with an online backup provider. I chose JungleDisk in this instance which I'm sure everyone knows stores all your data on an Amazon S3 cloud. That in itself is pretty ho-hum, however I did also finally purchase the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M to start getting rid of my reams of paper that seems to follow me around from city to city that I can't seem to shake off. Long story short, I have now happily scanned, OCR'd, indexed and backed up around 30% of my paper archives up to the JungleDisk cloud.

I went for the JungleDisk Plus service that gives me web access to all my files, and as I just discovered today, WebDAV. More on this later.

On a parallel, unrelated stream of work, I've also been sorting out my life by gradually bringing everything out of my head and on to my iPhone (NB: Comments about me gradually reducing my brain capacity and capabilities will be ruthlessly deleted). The tool that has been helping me do this is OmniFocus (desktop and iPhone editions). I had WebDAV synching running for a while set up on Apache however it was always a little bit irritating having to ensure my Mac was on before I could sync the two databases. Behold, today I just found out I can use the JungleDisk WebDAV server to sync my OF databases. Nice leveraging of my investment, huh?

All I had to do was point my desktop OF to https://myusername.myjungledisk.com/default/, punch in my credentials, share the settings to the iPhone and then sync back with my iPhone. Very very easy. And now even less thinking that I have to do. I'll let you decide whether that in itself is a good thing or not.