Contrary to my weblog's lack of activity, I have actually been pretty busy playing with some cool apps and technologies. Novell's iFolder was one such application I decided to try out recently.
Basically, iFolder is a tool for automatically keeping specific folders on multiple computers in sync. You can think of it as an advanced version of Briefcase, as a poor/lazy man's backup system, or as a handy way to share files among a group of people and computers. iFolder is commercially available as part of some grand suite of Novell enterprise apps, but it's also open source (GPL, watch out!) and available as a standalone app via iFolder's project page on Novell Forge. On a side note, iFolder is written in C# and runs on Windows using .NET and on Linux using Mono.
I use four or more computers during a typical day, so keeping a basic set of my files in sync across multiple machines would be very handy. Instead of emailing myself files and links, I could just save stuff into an iFolder and pick it up later on any of the other machines. This would help me keep to my goal of having less than 20 messages in my Inbox.
I installed iFolder on two Windows XP SP2 systems and I was immediately bombarded with four or five prompts from Windows Firewall about various executables and services needing to be unblocked. I'm not sure why iFolder needs to listen on so many ports, but I would hope this would get cleaned up as development progresses. Overall, iFolder looks pretty polished and is simple to get around, but some areas such as the built-in contact manager didn't seem to make much sense. I don't understand why anyone would want to enter phone numbers and mailing addresses in iFolder for people they want to share files with. Sharing my first iFolder consisted of having to create an address book, create a contact (in my case, for myself on another computer), and then sending an invitation via email to myself. Nothing more than an email address is actually needed and the whole address book functionality just seems to add unnecessary complexity.
Once I got it going, iFolder made quick work synchronizing a bunch of MP3s I dumped on it and I could immediately see how handy this tool could be. Unfortunately, I have since had trouble getting iFolder to recognize some new files and folders I added to my iFolder. I'm going to have to work on figuring out this problem or just hope it's fixed in a newer build before I can start using iFolder all the time. The only other thing I need to figure out is how iFolder protects files during transfer (SSL, some other encryption?).
Overall, my first impression is that iFolder is a very interesting application that has a bit more work ahead of it before it really catches on. The fact that it runs on Windows and Linux and is written in C# should help it attract developers to get all the kinks worked out over the next several months. I, for one, am excited that effortless file synchronization and sharing might be just around the corner.