News Articles

Sensory Metrics | March 19, 2007

transmedia releases Glide Synch for Mac

by Jobe Roberts

This past week transmedia announced a Mac application named “Glide Synch” that will let you upload your photos, music, videos, documents, iCal calendars, Mac Address Book contacts, and Safari, Camino and Firefox bookmarks to transmedia’s Glide server.

Glide is still beta software and it feels like it, there are features that just don’t work on Safari or they don’t work because I only signed up for the free version (sorry but I can’t tell if that’s the case). Glide is built with Flash and looks pretty cool, but I find that this software is trying to do too much. Not only can you view and share all of the photos, videos, docs, and so on, you can also edit photos, build a website, blog, present, publish, and do much more. I just wouldn’t want to do all of these things using this single service. For instance, the “my website” feature is just too weird. Great idea perhaps if there weren’t so many better alternatives out there to do that.

The other weirdness is their pricing. You can get a free account with 300 MB or a family account with 1GB. If you want more, it’s like $50 to $150 a year for more storage, and I’m guessing some of the features which didn’t work for me would become active. To me, the best part about Glide is that you can quickly pull all your contacts, bookmarks, calendar events, documents, and other files off your Mac and share them over the web. From there, you can access this data from your mobile web browser. This is what they should focus on. This is what’s really cool about Glide.

I have one last gripe… transmedia’s press release states that their software has “Advanced Synchronization” which will auto synch your data. If this is true, I just don’t get it using the “Glide Synch” app. Sure you can check off “Enable automatic synch” for a given folder in the prefs, but it would seem that you have to choose what to upload and you must manually do so whenever you have new content you want to put on the server. What’s up with that? At any rate, it’s a half decent start and could turn into a very good solution for getting data to your mobile, we’ll keep an eye on their progress.