But there is certainly room for improvement. With the release of Mac OS X Panther, Apple introduced the ability to sync your remote "idisk" (an online, mountable hard drive of sorts) with your Mac's "home" folder. This is a very cool idea, but it has a fatal flaw: It doesn't allow you to choose which folders are synced. Since I have gigs worth of music and digital video in my home folder -- and only 200 mb or so of iDisk space -- syncing really isn't feasible. Indeed, even if I had the money, I don't think I could buy enough space through .mac to sync that folder, and even if I could, waiting for 50 gig worth of files to sych -- even over DSL -- just isn't realistic.
What I'd love to see is the ability to sync specific folders -- for example, my "Writing" folder, which contains all my freelance work, and my "Gaming" folder, which contains all my Dungeons & Dragons and Spycraft campaign data -- to my iDisk. And not just to my iDisk -- I want to be able to do the same thing for my iPod. Heck, I could easily see buying one of the new iPod shuffles, and using it as a combination music player and documents folder, allowing me to carry my favorite music -- and often-needed files, like my character sheets -- where ever I go.
Will Apple ever do this? It's hard to tell. Looking over Mac OS X Tiger's syncing page, it appears that they're expanding what's sync able to include mail accounts and rules, which is nice, but not something I particularly need. At the very end of the page, however, they make mention of opening syncing to developers, saying:
"System-wide availability of sync services means that developers can now easily incorporate syncing capabilities into their applications. Fully expandable, this engine allows developers to go beyond synchronizing calendars, bookmarks and contact lists to sync new data types."
So it sounds like it could be possible, though it may fall to a third party like Microsoft to develop it.
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