Fraser Speirs – Two Macs: Fail.

Fraser Speirs, developer of the FlickrExport plug-ins for iPhoto and Aperture and the Exposure (iTunes link) iPhone Flickr client, shares the results of his two-year experiment of leaning on syncing technologies to span work across two machines.

In a nut: it didn’t go well. Between a mixture of wonky syncing services and some unique data requirements, Speirs ran into too many conflicts and other road blocks, and has given up on the system. He’s selling his Mac Pro and MacBook Air in favor of a single beefed up MacBook Pro and redundant Drobo storage.

I have to admit that I’ve teetered back and forth on this issue. I’ve been a huge fan of .Mac and its new incarnation, MobileMe, through thick and thin. I’ve had my own occasionally hair-pulling adventures with MobileMe and other syncing services, but they are admittedly getting much fewer and farther between for me. Speirs, for example, admits that he stuffs a ton of PDFs into Yojimbo, which can apparently cause MobileMe to choke when syncing. By comparison, Yojimbo, at least for me, has been one of the most reliable applications for syncing throughout my years of using it. But I have only used it for the occasional PDF, but lots of basic text text notes and serials. Now that I own an iPhone, I find myself switching to Evernote and moving a lot more of my Yojimbo stuff over. Ubiquitous access to information (including a Windows client) and automatic OCR are really hard to pass up.

While I still experience some of my own rare trouble with sync, and MobileMe’s iDisk still doesn’t seem to be very usable in light of solid competitors like Dropbox, I haven’t been driven to the same brink as Speirs. MobileMe is syncing pretty flawlessly now that the transition has smoothed out (especially with my iPhone 3G), and I don’t really need to do any collaborative calendar editing (besides, we have Exchange at Ars for when that day comes). Still, I’ve been in Speirs’ situation before and I can completely understand his frustration and decision to switch back to a single machine. Sync is a very sensitive beast, and even in 2008, it can still be a dangerous and frustrating component of anyone’s multi-computer lifestyle.