INCOMING!
Incoming! was created for Splash News, a news photo agency, to streamline the downloading of photographs. Photographers in various cities take pictures with digital cameras and upload them to a directory on an FTP server. These photographs need to be processed by staff in Splash's offices. There are offices in cities in different time zones (London, New York, Los Angeles) thatare responsible for processing the photos at different times of day. This gives Splash nearly round-the-clock coverage.

Incoming! is designed to be left running on a computer in each of the offices. When it sees that it is the right time for that city, it connects to the FTP server and gets a list of the files that are available. It compares that list to the files in a folder on the local hard drive, and downloads any files that aren't already in the local folder.


As a result, there is never any confusion about which files need to be downloaded, and who should be downloading them. Also, for the London office it downloads files before people arrive at work, so they can get right to processing, rather than waiting for files to download.