Marshall's Weblog

Staying organized. How do people do it? Closets and dressers for clothes. Shelves for books, movies and CD’s — most likely in some sort of alphabetical order. Calendars for upcoming events. But how do we keep our digital possessions organized? Some nested collections of folders/directories on a computer. This solution is OK if you only have one computer, however, the whole filing system falls apart when you add multiple computers.

Wanna store all of your music on computer 1? How are you going to access it from computer 2? You need to get them talking to each other, which isn’t all that difficult. But now computer 2 is dependent on computer 1 and computer 1 must be powered on in order for computer 2 to have access to said music. In my case, I have to have a noisy Athlon-powered box on to access some of my music from my silent Powerbook. On top of all of that, the Athlon has 3 hard drives with various partitions for Linux and Windows (FAT32 and NTFS) with various directories filled with music scattered across all partitions.

The simplest solution I have come across is the Mac Mini. This silent computer, equipped with an 80 GB drive, could serve music to any computer, my iPod, and also to my stereo system. It would also free up some space on my workstation so that I could repartition and reformat it without having to copy everything to DVD. I am hoping (and waiting) that Apple will upgrade the Mini’s to exclude some sort of digital audio out.

On the software side of organization, Apple has done an excellent job at creating easy to use applications to help a normal, non techie person, organize his/her life. iTunes by far beats any digital audio organizer in this category. iCal is simple to use and the ability to subscribe and publish calendars with ease is a great advantage to the user who has to manage their calendars at multiple locations. Address Book has been a hidden gem for me. Since I bought a RAZR, all of my friends and family have gone in there and it has helped me start a list of addresses for Christmas cards and special occasions. I have not played with iPhoto 5 yet, but, similar to iTunes, it rocks the socks off of other photo organizers, which reminds me. My digital photos suffer from the same “scatter-file syndrome” as my digital music.