May 21

Roaming User Accounts

Did you ever run into problems when moving from a computer to another? Unfortunately, a lot of people would give a positive answer to the previous question, and sometimes carrying portable applications on a USB drive doesn't solve all the problems. Now, a new Apple patent has just laid the foundation for a feature allowing computer users to transfer their accounts from one computer to another!

I know, this is not something out of ordinary, but it's something everyone tries to accomplish these days, so let's see why Apple's version should be considered different, shall we?

According to the Apple patent number 737824, filed at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, user accounts will be portable across different multi-user computer systems, while being able to be stored on external data storage devices. The best part of the deal is that changes will be performed directly on the removable data storage system, and not only on the local disk, as the patent says.

As I was saying in the beginning, Robert T. Bowers' and Steve Ko's patent isn't really a breakthrough, but it would be interesting to see where is Apple going to use it, because I am sure they won't simply allow roaming user accounts for Mac OS X, because that's already possible. Having common settings for your iPhone, iPod touch and MacBook, now that's something interesting!