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Das wollen echte Daddies!:

This is a piece of software I would love to have: A proxy that runs on my notebook and that intelligently caches certain websites so I can surf them when being offline.

More specifically:

• A proxy that runs on my notebook
• The proxy knows what pages/sites I want to have available when being offline
• When the browser requests one of those pages, the proxy checks wether the website is reachable. If so, it downloads the page and sends it to the browser. If the proxy can’t reach the website, it tries to serve the page from its local cache.

This way, I could surf normally when being online. When being offline, I could only access a little part of the internet – but I could still read some pages.

Once this is achieved, the proxy could be improved:

• While being idle and having an internet connection, it could refresh pages in it’s cache
• By counting what pages I access often, it could decide what pages make sense to be cached
• It could learn what pages change how often and adapt the refresh intervals accordingly
• …

And here are the questions I have:

• Does anyone out there know a tool that provides this functionality?
• Would anyone see a killer-problem I missed?
• Any good ideas how this could be built?

For completeness of information: I use a MacBook, OS X 10.6. Comments are welcome….

Have a nice evening,

– Till.

…auch wenn er nicht von Apple ist

– Till.

This is a vision I have. A piece of software that doesn’t exist yet (at least I didn’t find it) and that I think would be great to have.

The problem This is my situation when it comes to digital photos: We have 2 cameras (a big one, a small one), 2 mobile phones with integrated cameras and 3 Macs: Our stationary MacPro, my MacBookPro and an old MacBook. So we have iPhoto libraries all over. On every Mac there’s one.

What I would love to be able to do is

• easily create one big iPhoto library with all photos in it
• back up our pictures – all of them
• have a selection from within the “big library” on my smaller Macs (the MacBookPro and the MacBook)

What I do nowadays: Every once in a while I export all my pictures from the MacBookPro and import this stack into the iPhoto library of our stationary MacPro. After this act, the iPhoto library on the MacPro contains all of our pictures. But this export/import procedure takes hours: We currently have about 15’000 pictures and I haven’t found a waay to use the smart “Do not import duplicates” feature of iPhoto unless I import the pictures from my camera…

The vision Why not use Flickr as the picture repository. It’s always available, 25$ per year is a price I would be willing to pay, and the services offered are a good value:

Here’s what you get…

• • Unlimited uploads and storage
  • Unlimited sets and collections
  • Access to your original files
  • Stats on your account
  • Ad-free browsing and sharing
  • HD playback for high-definition video uploads NEW

Take the first 3 points, and you have all you need for an iPhoto-Repository. All you need is a piece of software, that syncs the pictures between your iPhoto libraries and Flickr.

I would imagine an iPhoto plugin (or have it just as separate piece of software) that

• pushes all my new pictures from the local iPhoto library to Flickr
  including the meta data that goes with it: album and event structures, comments, tags, geo-information…
• downloads pictures from Flickr to my local machine
  including all the meta data
  based on rules. Examples:
  - Always wanna have the most recent 5GB of pictures on that MacBook
  - All pictures or albums flagged with work
  - Whatever ideas
• Properly handles deletions: Somehow I need to be able to get rid of pictures – for real. Otherwise deleting a picture in one iPhoto library brings it mack with the next sync…
  

And now to the seniores software engineers: iPhoto has an API and Flickr has an API. So hurry, put together the stuff and please send it to me – I won’t charge anything for the good idea     Or let me know if I missed something and this tool already exists!

What a shame that I can’t program at night anymore – then again: may be there are better ways to spend the nights…

Buenas noches,

– Till.