The future of Gnome 3 - If I had something to say

I like that fact that development of towards Gnome 3.0 seem to be minimal but realistic. Preparing the platform for ease of development will pay off in the other end. I think they are focusing the energy the right places to get off the ground.

After 3.0 is released I hope they will look into this problem:

I have multiple computers and I can imagine the number will grow considerably over the years.

• Workstation (currently using)
• Laptop (currently using)
• Mediacenter (currently using)
• HTC Phone with Android (planing to buy)
• Computer in Kitchen (planing to buy)

I would like to access my contacts, calendar, notes, todo, file area (dropbox like), rss feeds, bookmarks etc. no mater what which computer I’m sitting at, or even via a browser if I’m not on one one of my own computers… or worse in Windows. I don’t want to manually sync stuff around, it is in efficient and is bound to go wrong at some point. Some effort have been made in order to store ie. Tomboy notes centrally via ssh or webdav which is acceptable because there is no alternative. Similar is Tasque able to store the todo online using an online service called Remember the Milk and Firefox plugins have been created to sync bookmarks across computers.

The real solution:

Create a service which can store all these information and host it. Now people could create a “Gnome Account” if they wanted to use this service. This kind of service would generate considerable amounts of data which is why the free Gnome service might have to have limitations on ie. how many contacts a user can have sync’ed or how much space the shared file area can take up. I also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of having commercials integrated in some way for this free service ie. like in Gmail.

For all those who cannot live with the limitations the “Gnome Account” has or just don’t like the commercials they can install the service on machine them selves or use the service from another provider. Ie. Ubuntu might want to provide the service to their users but want to sync bookmarks from Firefox instead of Epiphany. Or a company installs the server software and provides the service for a monthly fee without the same limitations than the “Gnome Account”.

Perhaps even companies could install their own sync service for all their employees.

To sum up this would ease the pain moving between several devices. Also when upgrading or installing a new device all you had to do is enter the “Gnome Account” once and all supported applications would instantly be in sync.