For ten years, I’ve wanted the ability to develop websites comfortably on any system. This means traveling to South America somewhere, sitting down at a public computer in a coffee shop and having all my bookmarks, RSS feeds, applications and development files available.
I’m pretty picky about streamlining my workflow, so a truly portable workspace would be ideal.
This is all taking shape now that cloud-computing has taken over. For me, an important missing link has always been convenient file storage. Then recently Matt recommended Jungle Disk, a desktop app that mounts as a shared drive, powered by Amazon Simple Storage.
Just like many PHP coders begin with Symfony or Code Igniter, and AJAX developers begin with MooTools or jQuery, I need my own designer’s framework (for lack of a better word) to build sites from whatever computer I happen to be using.
Jungle Disk provides me with a globally-accessible toolbox containing:
- Photoshop brushes, actions, swatches and styles
- Fonts
- Library of textures, stock photos and icons
- CSS/HTML frameworks
- Coda Clips and Dreamweaver snippets
- My baseline WordPress theme
They’re not paying me to point it out, but Jungle Disk is also insanely cheap, for my needs anyway. It has configuration options to schedule backups which ensures my home desktop, laptop and work machines can be synced up easily. There’s also a WorkGroup edition that allows for multiple buckets to be shared among other users.
Aside from file storage, there have also been major improvements the last two years in web-based image editors like Splashup, Pixlr and SumoPaint, plus coding apps like WYMeditor.
But what if what I really need is a more encompassing operating system-like environment that saves my user profile and application settings, while functioning as a browser? Some say that’s where Google Chrome is headed, if gOS Cloud hasn’t already surpassed it.
I’d predict within 3-4 years, all of the above will be integrated into a configurable workspace that I can access from anywhere. I’ll be able to sit in that South American coffee shop with all my tools available and build websites as quickly and comfortably as I can now. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll still pack my laptop.
8:34 am
I’ve been using S3 for both client work (site content delivery etc) as well as backups – but without the use of JungleDisk. I like the automated nature of services like Dropbox, which also offer very easy sharing features for other folks using the service – something I didn’t find in JungleDisk. Additionally, I haven’t found a decent iPhone interface (App or WebApp) to access S3 stuff – anyone?
11:01 am
Darren,
Cool article. i have been looking into something similar to this for myself, so that I am not stuck to working on whatever machine all my resources are on.
Great find I am definitely going to check it out.
1:56 am
I’ve been traveling out west, and ran into a need for this. The laptop I brought with me lost its wifi – something broke. So I’ve been borrowing a friend’s computer while I’m out here. It was a huge pain downloading a bunch of Subversion projects to this computer, which I’ll only use temporarily, but still, Subversion made the pain much less than what I otherwise might have had to deal with.
I’m without access to my favorite text editors while on this machine.
All of which is to say, I could imagine some benefits of a more portable system, even for programmers
2:33 pm
Darren,
What about:
1. Logmein.com for accessing your desktop software (Mac and PC). The basic version is free! I bet it will even run on a public computer or coffee shop.
2. Dropbox for file storage. There is even an Iphone interface
4:10 pm
Check out the WorkGroup edition, it may solve that problem.
@john: I’ve always understood logmein to be slow and buggy, but it’s a step in the right direction. It also still seems to be geared toward accessing files/apps located on private drives, whereas in 5 years, my guess is that nearly everything will live in the cloud. It’s just a matter of designing a browser/OS that feeds off all your various cloud services and ties them all together with one login.
Re: dropbox, I think for quick multi-user purposes it’s great, but for huge archives (mp3s, 30+GB) JungleDisk is nice. They both work pretty well for creating online/offline file systems. I’d like to keep an ear out for which pulls ahead of the other in terms of features.
1:40 am
gOS Cloud is still *really new* and not available for download yet. You can try ulteo now – http://www.ulteo.com
2:26 am
I have something like than, on a USB drive. Because I work with WordPress a lot, I have Server2Go on my drive, bundled with the last version of wordpress, a bunch of baseline themes/frameworks, 960.gs, BlueprintCSS, PSPad (a free open-source awesome windows text editor that is also portable and is uber functional for any coding language – web or not), FireFox mobile (mobilefirefox.com), and, as painful as it is (though perfectly legal in my case), a warezed Photoshop CS3 portable with all my fonts, actions, brushes, layer styles, gradients… Legal in my case b/c I own a full license of CS3 since it came out (well, school gave it to me, but it’s mine, still) so it qualifies as a personal copy, which is perfectly legal.
Oh, and the PDF version of Sitepoint’s CSS reference.
So yeah, I can work in ANY computer in the world (as long as it’s a PC :) )
And all that fits in a 4gb USB :) I’m going to buy one of those mini tiny ones and use it as a necklace. Maybe 8 gigs so i can fit in client profiles and agendas. Maybe I’ll make a big file and make it downloadable so people can use it…
11:00 pm
Yeahh.. sure,, it will happen in 3-4 years from now, I agree with you daren, we, as web developer will need that facility.