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I now own an iPad (iPad2) and I was looking for software that allowed me to easily transfer stuff back and forth between the iPad and my laptop; I picked one called Air Sharing. I also wanted to be able to use my Word and related documents, so I got OfficeHD.

Taken as themselves they seem to work fine, but I can't seem to find a way to ACCESS things brought over by Air Sharing except THROUGH Air Sharing, and similarly with OfficeHD. And if I try to open ones on Air Sharing, they don't use OfficeHD to open them.

Any ideas on how to solve this? Ideally I want to bring stuff over to the iPad and have it be accessible by the appropriate apps.

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From:

ninjarat.livejournal.com

Because it's rsync-based, when you edit a file, only the actual changes you made to it are uploaded across the net.

Actually, it isn't and it doesn't. At least it didn't last time I tried something very close to this, which was about a year and a half ago.

The biggest problem with Dropbox for me is the backend storage. There's no encryption at all. It's a bunch of Amazon S3 buckets. I've tried layering EncFS on top of the Dropbox folder but the singular nature of that folder gets in the way. It's just too inconvenient for me to use on a regular basis.

I use a tool called Unison. It does real two-way sync and it handles conflicts far more gracefully than Dropbox (which doesn't really handle conflicts; it just pretends hides them under the rug). The inconvenience of running the Unison sync tool after login and before logout is slight compared to changing all of my workflows. But then, I don't use tablet appliances so I'm not at all inconvenienced by their shortcomings.

I've looked into some automated systems based on Git. Yes, the revision control system. Git's replication mechanism lends itself to sync-like utility with built-in revision control and conflict resolution. Best of all worlds, at least in concept. Sparkleshare is a pre-rolled system based on Git but I've found some of its UI limitations to be too limiting for my needs.