The Year of the Cloud
Seems as if this is the Year of the Cloud - my personal year of the cloud, anyway. Without so much as an actual plan, I found myself having moved much of my personal computing out of my computer(s) into the cloud - not a big deal when you're always on.
- Mail-wise, I've been in the cloud for quite a while now, using GMail and - to a much lesser degree - my good old shell account with SDF. Yes, accessing and managing a mailbox through a SSH connection is cloud computing, too, albeit rather old school. Also, my calendar is being handled by Google.
- To GTD, I've been using Remember the Milk, a cloud based service with more sensible bells and whistles than one can think of. Although I like it very much, I've switched to Google's task manager, not the least because it integrated rather nicely with both GMail and Google Calendar. And I've never really needed most of the bells or whistles.
- Word processing, spreadsheets? You find me at Google Docs (known as "Google Texte und Tabellen" to German users). I probably wouldn't use it for huge documents with complex layouts, indices, change management - but for my personal needs, it actually works. Privacy implications we are going to discuss sometimes else.
- File exchange and backup - that is Dropbox for me. This is partly due to a very restrictive security policy at my workplace, where plain old USB sticks are prohibited by default, so I'm using Dropbox even to send large files to my coworkers (deleting them as soon as the coworker has downloaded them!). Actually, I even used Evernote to do the same thing but found it to complicated and much to powerful for simple file exchange.
- Speaking of Evernote: It is powerful, more than any other similar service I know. Still, I seem to be switching to Memonic, a service by a Swiss startup company which doesn't have a desktop or mobile client and also lacks many of Evernote's other features, but sports a clean and simple interface - which I seem to prefer over the power solutions recently.
- My mindmaps are done with MindMeister, whenever I need them. It's not as comfortable as a desktop application, but it exports and imports data to and from the most popular formats which is kind of important in my work context. Also, I have access to everything wherever I am connected.
- Finally, the newest addition to my cloud activities has something to do with my current project which keeps me from blogging so much recently. I'm dabbling with PHP and MySQL, and started doing so on a local MAMP installation on my desktop, testing the newest additions on a rarely used web server at SDF. Over the weekend, I discovered Kodingen - an online development environment for more than just PHP. Kind of interesting - you have a sandbox installation where you can test your code without having to FTP it anywhere first. The editor obviously is not as responsive as the editor of your choice at home - but you have your development environment with you all the time. But that's just a hobby - serious developers might not take this as seriously. Also, Kodingen is in an early beta stage and might not be ready for mission critical work.
What do I still need my desktop computer for? Any data-intensive computing such as working with images, sounds or videos, obviously. And I believe that these needs will stick around for a while, so my Year of the Cloud (if it really turns out to be one) won't be my year of the thin clients as well. Nor would be the year after that.
Having written that, I'm leaving the cloud, heading out under the real clouds, as found in the real world.
