So far, we’ve addressed some of the larger development teams, like the Camino Project. This week, we’re going to go for one of the smaller companies, Martian Technology, makers of Slingshot — an easy to use file synchronization and backup application that runs via Bonjour.

Something that can definitely be noticed about the folks at Martian is that they have a sense of humor about their corporate persona, yet still produce an excellent product with feedback directly from the users. Shortly after purchasing Slingshot from the company, I sent an email inquiring about the possibility of a new feature or alteration of an old one, and they were immediately responsive, answering my questions in a professional but affable manner. It’s the sort of attitude and response I wish larger companies would adopt.

Slingshot itself is a fascinating little program. The way that it works is that you install the application on each machine you want to keep in sync (relax, that’s all on one license), and turn it on. You set up the folders or files you want to keep sync’d by “publishing” them on the primary machine, and then “subscribing” to those files on the secondary machines. It will then automagically keep these files or folders synchronized on a regular basis.

Personally, I have a laptop and a desktop set up. I do a lot of my writing and other work on my laptop, but want to keep things backed up on the desktop. What I’ve done is set the desktop as the publisher, with a setting marked to accept updates and new files from subscribers, essentially turning the desktop into a repository. Just because I go a little overkill with backing things up (you lose one drive, and you’re a die-hard archiver for life), I then have my desktop as a subscriber to itself, placing those subscribed files to an external hard drive I have attached. There are several variations I could have done to achieve this same effect, but this makes sense to me, and Slingshot is versatile enough to accommodate my needs.

All in all, Martian Technology has proven to be a really delightful company to work with, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what next they come out with.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 9:00 AM and is filed under AppleTalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.