I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Lance linked to this article on shinking your 160GB Mac Book Pro life on a 64GB MacBook Air.
There are comments around whether the MacBook Air is a companion product for power usesr.
I only want one computer, my life is in the cloud anyway, but this highlights a problem with Apple that has been bugging me for a year.
The Apple Software is designed for a single user and that scenario is just incorrect for many home users. iPhoto and iTunes (to a lesser extent) are the classic example. My wife and I both take photos, I want some of them on my laptop and we want all of them backed up and deduped etc.
With Time Capsule there is a single household NAS for backup. So the hardware and network is in place. iTunes supports an easy-to-use interface for syncing collections down to your iPod and AppleTV so you can manage storage limits on multiple devices - but this is off your library on your primary Mac. The next step has to be an iPhoto and iTunes home server.
Not only is this required for the 2+ user scenario, it is now required by the smaller disk size of the MacBook Air when you cannot possibly hold all of your photos or music.
I think it should work like this.
- iTunes gets a ‘New Media’ section. Photo’s or new Tunes are loaded onto your working Mac as per normal but identified as a collection of ‘New Media’.
- When you connect to your local network, all that New Media is seamlessly loaded back to your central Library. iTunes allows you to categorize and tag it from your local machine.
- Multiple Mac’s can use the same home library. Content is de-duplicated as it is uploaded.
- Just like with an Apple TV you set the sync rules but the central library is the master and your working Mac only gets a subset sync’d down so you can manage the size of files you carry with you.
Sort of like this …
Apple software right now is lagging behind the hardware. What do you think? Is it so obvious they must be working in it?
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Nail on the head again, Rod.
I’d settle for being able to make a new iphoto library from a selection of photos (ie, archive them off my laptop onto something else), or merge in a library. But I can’t even do THAT.
So close, yet so far away (and so easy to fix!)
I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages as well. Currently we have a Mac Mini set up as our “Sync Station” where we hook up our iPods so we can sync them. For photos we just have our own collections at the moment which is not ideal.
The one thing I see missing from your set up is the iPod. What I would like to see is that no matter what Mac you hook your iPod up to it ‘phones home’ and syncs with the server. I listen to a lot of podcasts and while on trips there is no way to update them as my iTunes library is stored on a machine at home (not on my laptop). It would be good to have “Back to my Mac” style of system where it goes over the internet and gets the latest updates.
I’m not so sure about totally obvious, but it is the logical next step & Apple at the moment really seem to be delivering what’s required with good momentum, seems to me your server is the next device to follow the time capsule.
There are a number of third party applications which already support this (for iTunes). One of the better ones can be found at this link:
http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/tuneranger/index.html
For only $29 US it’s not too badly priced. But no doubt this is something that Apple will address in future updates (we hope)
Thanks Matt. That still looks more Peer to Peer than a NAS type model to me.
Perfectly described need Rod.
Currently I run two iPhoto databases, and switch between them using iPhoto Buddy. It is less than optimal as transferring from one to the other is very painful.
I suppose I could hook my HD to my airport extreme, and use that as the iphoto and itunes server. It would be nice to access it over the net as well.
I want this set up now :)
Rod, check out this link
http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/12/02/hp-mediasmart-as-an-itunes-server.aspx
He talks about using HP MediaSmart Server on both a Mac and a Windows PC.
I have an iPod in my car setup on my home computer and a Touch which was setup on my notebook. What I find annoying is if I plug the Touch into my home computer it seems to want to erase everything on the iPod and start again.
Why cannot Apple understand that people may have multiple portable devices plus multiple computers - work desktop, notebook, home computer.
Like Glen - we use a Mac Mini as a media server for the house, wirelessly networked to my wife and my laptops plus legacy PC’s that the kids are using for their work. Music, photos and video all centralised and hooked up directly to a hungry 62″ flat screen. As an Apple newbie, the “it just works” has certainly played out for me in this setup but agree that a method which requires less manual intervention in terms of syncing would be great.
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I’d suggest that it would be nice to have a variety of server capabilities on a TimeCaspule. One I’ve not seen mentioned previously would be iCal.
iPhoto/Tunes could do with better handling of multiple libraries - given a relatively common scenario of several people in one household/workplace why not make it easy to set iPhoto/Tunes to know of several libraries concurrently. A private one (or more) on each machine and one (or more) shared on the server. Make it simple to move items from one to another.
Similarly for iCal - yes I know you can publish and subscribe calendars but TC should have calendar server to prove live sharing.
Similarly again for address books; there are household addresses (local police, doctor, eateries) and private ones (girlfriends, toyshops, etc).
When you’re connected to the TC/server the shared stuff should just be there and the relevant apps should simply behave as if it’s all one blob on info. I don’t doubt that a lot of this can be done with this app and that app and fiddle this plist and run this script but the key value of Apple stuff is making it Just Work. They should Just Do It. Next week would be fine…..
Yes !!!
Badly waiting for iTunes, iPhoto Server software for multi-user access over my home network. Apple lags behind Linux and Windows.