It is abundantly clear that huge advantages accrue to having personal information—email, contacts, calendar, etc.—available anywhere. Apple’s MobileMe (buy the old version and save) syncing service handles most of this wirelessly. If I update a contact on my iPhone, for example, it’s automatically pushed up to Apple’s MobileMe service “in the cloud” and sent to all my other computers and devices. It’s incredibly handy, and if you have more than one device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac laptop or Mac desktop) to keep information on, I highly recommend it.
It doesn’t sync everything, though, and it’s those last bits of informational distribution between devices that I’m struggling with. Specifically, I’ve got issues with email storage and financial recording and record keeping.
I have virtually every email I’ve sent or received since about 1993. I’ve deleted spam, some mailing list stuff, etc., but otherwise I’ve pretty much got everything. That’s a huge and personally meaningful historical record. (And one of the reasons I don’t see myself ever abandoning email for instant messaging, Twitter, or Facebook messages. In fact, I have all Facebook messages emailed to me so that I can archive them.)
I can already pick up new messages from anywhere, but what about accessing these historical emails? The more tech-savvy among you already know what I’m going to say here: I’m putting them online. Not for just anyone, of course, but for me. I’m creating email folders at my IMAP-based email server and I’m moving my tens of thousands of messages into them. I will be able to access them from anywhere. I know I’m late to the party—IMAP has long been capable of doing this and GMail has offered it for years—but I finally now feel the need and see the advantages.
The second issue is recording and accessing financial data, notably Quicken and QuickBooks. I have no solution yet other than to log in remotely to my Mac Pro in the office and record and view things. It’s not intolerable, but it’s wildly inefficient. Here’s the ideal scenario: I get a bill at a restaurant, I enter it in the iPhone and the data is automatically synced back into my main Quicken file at home (or online). Since I don’t have a good solution—I suspect the answer will have to come from somebody like Intuit—I’m not fully mobile.
But I’m getting close, and that’s a very exciting prospect.