Testing the iFolder beta
I’m excited about the upcoming release of a mature open source iFolder from Novell. Searching around for some noise on this has yielded little; I’m not really sure why people aren’t more excited about this software, because widespread deployment of it will have a huge impact on the small and medium business markets, and almost certainly on our usage of the internet as a whole.
iFolder essentially lets you synchronize folders across the network. The initial prospect of this is that it enables painless storage of a users files on a server without any penalty of slow access. This is an even huger benefit when you consider what it could do for remote users, either dial-up or WAN, and the simplification of managing server backups for said users.
Another major strength of the model is that those of us who use different computers always have an up-to-date copy of files available on each system, completely hands-free.
One of the most interesting features to be introduced in the new iFolder3 is that the client is also a server. You can designate an ifolder on your drive and invite anyone else to share that folder. They sync it up with an empty folder on their system and depending on whether they have read or read/write access you have either a distribution channel or a shared workspace. Awesome for working on projects with your virtual officemates, or just distributing selected music files to friends on your never-ending mix-tape.
Because the software is free as in freedom, I expect to become quite widespread. It’s not cool that many desktop users still use e-mail to trade files back and forth. That file transfer through IM is still one of the better solutions for average users is also a bit pathetic.
The current milestones are still pretty unstable, but they do run, and there are reports of them actually getting to the syncing stage (something I’m still working on).