Doing stuff "in the cloud" is, as the French would say, "au courant", or as we might say, "groovy." But cloud services from your desktop aren't always so easy because there's usually some kind of speed bump that will slow you down and make your life more complicated.

This speed bump will most often be in the form of having to use a Web interface which, while these work fairly well for managing processes and deploying services, aren't so great for file operations (upload, download, copy, move and delete).

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

Take Google Docs: The user interface is pretty good (given that it is free, perhaps I should say "excellent"), but if you want to synchronize a local document folder with a Docs folder then it's all manual … unless you can automate it.

But really, do you want to be figuring out how to automate synchronizing services for Google Docs, or Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive, or any of the other cloud storage services, or would you rather just buy software that will do it for you? I thought so; you'd rather take the Path of Least Resistance.

Here, then, is a very promising Path of Least Resistance for cloud storage and desktop integration: Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Cloud Desktop is a Windows utility (a Mac version is in development) that maps a driver for cloud services to a local drive. Under the local drive, you establish virtual subdirectories that, in turn, map to specific cloud storage services.

For example, you might map drive X: to the Cloud Desktop services and name it "Cloud." Then, using the Cloud Desktop software, you would create subdirectories under that drive for each of the cloud storage services you use. Finally, to gild the lily, you would set up either a continuous or timed synchronization for files and or subdirectories on local storage and on cloud storage.

Cloud Desktop supports a considerable number of cloud storage services, including Amazon S3, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Box.net, EMC Atmos onLine and Atmos Storage, Google Docs and Docs for Google Apps, Google Picasa, Nirvanix Storage, and Windows Azure Blob Storage and Live SkyDrive, as well as network share-, FTP- and WedDav-based storage systems.

You can also specifically back up all the music, videos, pictures or documents on your system and you can create redundant backups using multiple cloud storage providers.

Cloud Desktop comes in three flavors: Starter, which is free; Professional, priced at $60; and Premium, which is still in the works and not yet priced. Use the Professional version as a home user and the license price is discounted to $40 and installation on multiple machines is allowed (academic and volume licenses are also available).  

Cloud Desktop comes with programs that integrate your various cloud storage services, manage your connections, handle your synchronization tasks, report on synchronization progress and provide diagnostics.

So, what's the downside? Well, you can use Windows Explorer to copy, rename and delete files on cloud storage services, and although it is possible to copy a file from one directory to another, moving files isn't. You have to copy the file to local storage, delete the cloud version, and then copy the local version to the new cloud location. And if you try to open a document that is on a drive mapped to a cloud services in Word or Excel, all you'll get is an empty document (cloud service APIs don't have a one-to-one functional correspondence with Windows APIs for file access).

Another issue is that performance noticeably lags when using cloud resources accessed via FTP, and when you make a change on a cloud resource such as the addition of a subdirectory, the change isn't visible in Cloud Desktop until the user interface is restarted.

My other complaint is the numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes littered throughout the software (I can never understand how product managers miss such basic issues).

But here's the bottom line: Gladinet Cloud Desktop does, more or less, what it claims to do; it integrates cloud storage with the Windows desktop more effectively and seamlessly than any other utility I've seen so far. Gladinet Cloud Desktop gets a rating of 4.5 out of 5.

Gibbs's head is in the clouds in Ventura, Calif. Your dream to gearhead@gibbs.com.