Crazy Hawt

Keeping with the theme of recent Sheevaplug related articles, here’s a post about a new, interesting piece of software called Tonido. Tonido advertises itself as a “personal cloud,” allowing you to share all of your personal files to anywhere. It’s a software platform that you install on your own home server. Once you’ve installed the platform, you can run a plethora of applications, and they have an SDK, in hopes that others pick up and write their own apps for it as well. It’s cross-platform. You can install it on Linux, OS X, or Windows. Or if you want, you can even buy their own plug PC, the TonidoPlug. Read on to hear a bit about installation on my Sheevaplug and my first impressions of the software.As I’m installing Tonido on my own Sheevaplug, I need to buy the embedded license for a hair under $30 from Tonido. After buying the license, you’ll get an e-mail from Tonido, asking for your MAC Address. You respond with the MAC Address, and they send you the link to download the software. Installation is pretty simple. I used wget to download the file onto my sheevaplug, and then I installed it with dpkg -i tonido-file.deb . Done. I then added the startup script to my /etc/rc.local file to make sure Tonido starts up at boot.

Once you’ve started the server, you can navigate to it with your web browser by going to the server’s IP address at port 10001 with your web browser. You’ll be greeted with a Tonido login screen, allowing you to create a new Tonido username and password. Upon doing this, you’re at the Tonido homescreen. Here’s a screenshot of mine below:

Click for full-size image

As you can see, it’s a very clean, Web 2.0 looking interface. Clicking “Apps” will let you install some of the many included applications. “Groups” allows you to connect and share with other Tonido users, and “Inbox” lets you send messages to other Tonido users. I’m not very interested in the latter two. I get that they are trying to play up social networking, community, and connecting, but I don’t really have an interest in doing that. I just want cool apps for my “personal cloud.”

You get the following included apps out of the box:

• Jukebox
• Thots
• Torrent
• Workspace
• Webshare
• Photos
• Search

The first thing I did was install the Jukebox application. This lets you play music from your server no matter where in the world you are. My server has my entire library on it so this sounded great! I was quickly disappointed. First off, it only supports MP3s at this time. All of my AAC (non-drm) files are useless. Furthermore, I was really surprised to see that it doesn’t organize my music by ID3 tags! Instead, it uses my folder structure. Modern music apps like iTunes use tags like artist, album, genre, etc to browse music. I love the idea of having a cloud based jukebox. I’m not sure how useful it is, considering that I have my laptop with me most of the time, and if I don’t, I have my iPhone, but if I wanted to browse to a specific song on a friend’s computer, I totally could with the jukebox. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this implementation is very good at this point. Add support for more file types than MP3 (AAC please!) and support ID3 tags, and then maybe I’ll be interested.

I didn’t play around with Thots, Torrent, or Workspace very much. I don’t need an always-on bittorrent client. As for Thots and Workspace, I don’t know if I fully understand the value of having this on my own personal server. Why can’t I just use google docs, blogspot, or something similar? In fact, I actually find these apps inferior to current web-based offerings. If my personal internet connection dies, my router needs to be reset, or my drive hooked up to my tonido server dies, then I lose access to whatever I wrote with Thots. Using an already available free service protects against this, as the true “cloud” includes data replication and backup. A personal jukebox, I get it. A personal torrent server, I don’t use it, but I get it… Personal blog / notes on my own personal server? eh…. You’re losing me there.

Webshare is actually a really great app, though. My Sheevaplug has a USB drive attached to it as a NAS, and so now with Tonido, I can drag a file onto my NAS, and then use Webshare to send anyone a link to the files. For example, my friend left a flash drive of important files at my house. The files were too big to zip up and e-mail. I copied them to my NAS, fired up Tonido, and sent him a link to the files. You can set it to be available publicly to anyone or you can set username / password access. You get a link to send the person, and then your friend can browse the folder of files, download files individually, or click one button to have everything zipped up and downloaded. VERY handy! I find Tonido to be almost worth the price just for this app!

Click for full-size image

I didn’t bother to play with the Photos App as this centers around the fact that you have pictures ordered hierarchically in folders. I don’t – I use iPhoto. So unless they can offer some time of iPhoto integration, which I don’t find likely, I’ll probably skip that app. As for search, I don’t have a need for this. My Macbook has Spotlight built-in, and anything on my Sheevaplug is sync’d from the Mac.

Another great thing is the Tonido Relay Service. This allows you to access everything on your Tonido remotely, without having to open up any ports on your router. I actually don’t know the technical details of how it works, but it DOES work very well. You use your username and navigate to http://username.tonidoid.com/. And just like that, you’re on your Tonido remotely. It lets you do everything you can do with the local network connection. Very cool!

Image taken from Codelathe's blog. Click to be taken there.

That covers all of the included applications. Is it worth $30? Like I said, for me, it’s worth it for the web sharing capabilities. I love that if I need to send a friend a file, or a folder of files, I can just throw it on the NAS and send them a link to the file. I can give them unique individual access or I can jut make it public. Very cool stuff. As for the rest, if the Jukebox app undergoes some improvements, I would definitely use it. The rest is up to the developer community that Tonido is trying to build. I can imagine that there are some innovative people out there who will build Tonido apps that I never even thought of. If and when that community flourishes, Tonido will be even more useful. Until then, I recommend this application, but only to power users who know exactly what the pros and cons are going into it. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions. Thanks!

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