posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2005 5:02 AM by Jonathan Hodgson

Orb and 'your data via the cloud'

As mentioned by Robert Scoble, Orb is a software solution for viewing your photos, music and video on another PC. I remember wanting to try this a while ago but it subscription service and you had to be in the US, that has now be lifted and it is free to use.

You install a client piece on your home computer and then you can login from another Internet connected PC and select your content to view/stream.

I had a little play, just sharing my music collection and listening to it during the day from the offic; it just works and sound quality was great. However I wasn't so keen on the number of ports the client service opens, but I'll look at that if I decide to continue using it.

Shouldn't this be part of the operating system? Come on Microsoft, people want a file synchronisation piece that just works, I'm regularly working on the same files across my work pc, home pc and laptop. They have tried before with briefcase, etc. and little utilities like the Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager and SyncToy but let's have something proper with compression and delta changes. I'd also like to sync' what RSS feeds I have read across machines. Will the Windows Vista Sync Center application provide a universal service for all applications to use or just My Documents?

There are a number of commercial tools that provide similar functionality today, have you any recommendations?

Comments

# re: Orb and 'your data via the cloud'

Thursday, October 13, 2005 6:40 AM by Mike
Hiya,

I'd definitely be interested in what you work out about ports here. As I read it you do need to open up a port in your firewall for the Orb traffic and that scared me out of using it at home.

On the Sync side of things - further out, there's also the synchronisation functionality of WinFS to take a look at as I think it has some of that delta-ing functionality you're talking about.

Mike.