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Earlier this week I asked my friends, readers and Twitter followers “How many desktop or laptop computers do you use in a normal day?” A simple question that you might expect would have an answer of 1 or 2 for most people. Surprisingly the average answer was 3, and there were many in the 4-5 range, with mine and several others ballooning up to 8! In this case, we weren’t counting servers, just desktops, laptops, netbooks and net bookish devices like the iPad.

While I had thought I was one of the lone geeks with a ridiculous amount of PCs I touched daily, it turns out it’s not as uncommon as you might think.

Of course my results are skewed over “Normal People” because I asked via mediums that lend themselves to tech savvy users, but we can only assume it’s some sort of leading indicator of what the future might bring.

So what does this have to do with anything you might ask? In this world of multiple computers, multiple operating systems is beginning to be as common as multiple computers. We’ll conveniently skip over Linux for this article, as it’s not really making much of a blip on usage scale and concentrate on Mac and PC.

Living In Two Worlds

It used to be very difficult. I can remember a time when Photoshop 3.0 for Mac wouldn’t read Photoshop 3.0 for PC files. I can remember a time when you had to have some arcane utility just to get a Mac to read a PC formatted disc and vice versa. Back in the day living between multiple platforms was a headache to put it very mildly.

These days my computer ecosystem looks like the diagram below. 3 PCs, 4 Macs and an iPad. That’s a lot of devices, but something occurred to me the other day, and inspired this blog. With the exception of a few specialized applications (Logic Studio or Final Cut for example) it really makes no difference which machine I use. Any time I sit down at a desk or pick up a laptop, when I start working, all my files are exactly where I left them, all of my IM accounts are ready to go, my email is not only set up but perfectly in sync and all of the applications I need to use regularly are available in some form or another on the device I am using at the time.

That’s a hell of a lot of progress in 10 years. These days whether you use a Mac or a PC boils down to a preference.

How Did I Get There?

I don’t want to disillusion you and let you think that it worked this way out of the box. It took some trial and error and patience to figure out what to use and when. Hopefully, if you find yourself living between more than one computer regularly, this article will give you the tools to do it seamlessly.

Where Do My Files Belong

Mac and PC both use the concept of something like a “home folder.” On the Mac it’s your user/profile folder, on the PC, it’s your My Documents folder. I have mentioned it many times before, but step one of keeping everything perfectly in place, in sync, and organized to any Monk’ish degree you prefer, is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service (up to 2GB, 50GB for $9.99/mo.) that does two things important things. First, it keeps your files available online, so anything you save into your Dropbox folder, is automatically saved to a server on the internet for you to access from anywhere. The second, and most important thing for our scenario, is that it copies that file to the same location on any PC you have added to your Dropbox network. In my case there are 7 computers that run the Dropbox Client, and they collectively sync about 6GB of files. I use it to store anything I am currently working on or might need access to remotely. This includes serial numbers for all the software I own, receipts, documents, some images, etc.

In the case of my work files, I don’t want to share them with my personal files, so my two work machines also have Windows Live Sync installed, and they synchronize my work files in much the same way. No matter which machine I use, the latest stuff is always there, awesome!

Sign up for Dropbox with the following link to get 250MB of extra space free.

Managing the Email Mess

I think we have all done this at some point. You got access to email, you set up your email client with the default settings, and started getting mail. You, deleted a mail you didn’t want, only to move to the second machine and have it downloaded again.

Perhaps you sent your friend a message and needed to check something later, but it was only in the Sent Items folder of the machine you sent it from.

Maybe you actually took the time to create folders and organize all of your mail only to have to do it all over again when you got home.

Perhaps you got really slick with Outlook and did it all with a PST file and then deleted all of your mail and re-imported it when you got to the other machine.

However you did it, you have dealt with managing email in multiple places and it sucks. Luckily there is a much better way. Many services now support a mail protocol called IMAP. In Gmail for example, by simply changing a setting to enable IMAP, and setting up your email clients to access your email this way, all of the problems I mentioned above magically disappear. Your mail is all centrally managed on the server. Sure your local machine can cache it so you don’t have to wait for it to download every time, but any change you make anywhere is automatically reflected anywhere else.

That means that you can delete, send, organize and forward to your heart’s content and you’ll never be stuck trying to figure out what you did. It’s beautiful.

Marking Your Books

I am sure you have been here too. You are at work, someone sends you a link, you want to check it out more when you get home. I bet right now you open up your email client and email yourself the link, right? I used to. Now I use X-Marks. X-Marks supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. Once you create an account and set it up on all of your machines, your bookmarks are always synced.

When I come into this problem, I bookmark the site, and when I get home it’s sitting in my bookmarks right where I left it. I don’t think I could live without it. When you are as OCD as I am, your bookmark structure is as important to you as the bookmarks themselves.

What else?

There are many other tools that can accomplish these types of tasks, these are ones I use and trust. There are also more advanced syncing techniques for specific applications and working with the same files between different applications that I will cover in a future article. For now, take these tips and streamline your life between computers.

In a conversation with a friend this week, I realized that I have mastered a very dark art. I have figured out how to move around between many computers, using them frequently, while never being without my data and information regardless of the computer, the operating system, the browser and the like.

I am not sure how you work, but if you are in the technology industry like me, you find yourself using several different machines. At work I have a desktop PC that I use running Windows 7 with both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 as browsers. I also have a company issued laptop that runs Windows 7 and Internet Explorer.

At home it get’s much messier. My main machine runs Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 as the main browser, but I also find my time split with a Macbook Pro laptop with Safari and Firefox, a two Mac Pros both with only Safari, and occasional use of an iMac with Safari as well.

That’s a big stew of machines and several different regular browsers. Now the question is (other than why do I have so many machines) what do I do with them and how do I manage to do that comfortably on any machine? I’ll break this down into a few types of productivity, and then explain how I manage to move through this quagmire with grace and style.

Email

One of the most frustrating things to use on multiple computers and now phones, is email. The most simple of internet transports, email can be a total mess when you start checking it in more than one place. Traditionally, email moves over two protocols, POP3 for sending email, and SMTP for receiving email. If you don’t know what those are, feel free to read the Wikipedia links. The problem with using POP3 for receiving email, is that you pretty much have two options. You can download the message to your computer and remove it from the server, making it impossible for you to retrieve from the next machine, or you can download it while leaving a copy on the server, which means the next machine will download the message regardless of whether you have identified it as junk or not.

This all sounds so messy, but fear not, there is a very lovely solution in sight. Not every email service supports it, but Gmail does. I migrated my personal domain email over to Gmail a few years ago, and enabled IMAP support. IMAP is an alternative protocol to POP3 that instead of downloading messages, maintains a live connection to your mailbox.

The benefit of this solution is that if I delete an email with my email client, it is automatically deleted from the server. If I send an email, a copy of that email is stored in the sent items on the server. If I reorganize my entire email folder system, it is reflected the next time I log in from another machine.

This functionality takes all of the tedium out of managing my email in multiple places. While I am at work, I don’t use an email client, I simply manage my email on the web. When I come home and open up Thunderbird, in a few seconds all of the changes I made to my mailbox are reflected and I am exactly how I left it the last place I was. This even works for managing my email on my iPhone. If I delete a message it’s gone, if I send it, it’s sitting on my desktop in sent items the next time I am home. I am sold.

Files

Another really frustrating point when working between machines is constantly thumbing around files, emailing them, dealing with version hassles and simply being frustrated because you don’t have access to something. I have parsed my files in two manners. All of what I call “productivity files” are stored in the service Dropbox. The Dropbox program is on all of my PCs, Macs and iPhone and the service makes sure that a recent copy of all of my files I need is synced to all of the machines. The files are all stored in the same place in the same file structure.

These files are also available, including 30 days worth of version history, online. This has come in very handy when I deleted something and then realized I needed it, or just wanted to go back to a previous version of something. When I open a document, change it and save it, within seconds the changed version is updated on all of my machines. I never have to make any effort to move or manage the files.

I have replaced the Camera app on my iPhone with the Dropbox app and now every photo I take is instantly available on all of my computers. Another awesome convenience is a public folder that I can copy files to and then provide a link for anyone to download them, I have used this an infinite number of times already to share a file quickly with a friend via IM or email, it’s much more convenient than sending the actual file or trying to transfer it via IM transfer.

While the $10/mo service I pay for (2GB per month is free) gives me plenty of space, some of the music and video files I work with are just too big to conveniently transfer over the internet, for those files I use Windows Home Server. Windows Home Server is where all of my media is saved when I am at home, and conveniently, Microsoft gives you the ability to make your server publicly available so you can log in and download a movie or some songs that you realized you wanted to have somewhere else. Pretty handy feature! There is also the ability to add files to it while you are remote.

The last convenient feature with Windows Home Server is the ability to remote desktop into any computer on my home network via the server as a gateway. If it happens that I have not stored the file in Dropbox, and I am not saving it on the server, I can physically take control of any PC on my network (and Macs via VNC) and get the file I need and move it to a location I can get to. I love thumb drives, but I don’t find myself needing them quite as much anymore.

Bookmarks

There was a long time when I just plain didn’t use bookmarks. I still read MOST of the sites I follow via RSS, but with all of the banking sites, retirement sites, my personal sites, things I just want to look at again later, as well as webmail, Bloglines and work email, bookmarks are just easier. I keep all the ones I really use in a hierarchy in the browser’s bookmark toolbar so I have quick access.

The problem is that I use different browsers on different OSes, so I can’t just sync bookmark files or something. Enter X-Marks. X-marks is a service that works on any browser on any operating system (at least the major ones) that keeps a server copy of all my bookmarks that I can manage. Then when it syncs, it makes sure that everything is how it should be. That way if I bookmark something to look at it later, it’s bookmarked on my PC when I get home.

I can’t tell you how handy it is. I actually keep a bookmark folder called “Random” that I throw this stuff into so I can keep it away from the meticulous organization of my other bookmarks (did I mention I am a bit OCD?)

What Does It All Mean?

What it means is that I always have my stuff. It also means that with a new machine or a necessary reinstall, I can pretty much install X-Marks, Dropbox and Office and I am back in business and can work. It also means that if I find myself on a rogue machine I don’t own, I can get to my stuff if I need to do something. It makes for a very clean workflow for my nomadic computing lifestyle.

I hope this helps those of you that find yourself between machines often. This is also really useful information if you find yourself dual booting (bootcamp for you Mac guys) a lot!