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File Management
Our lives are increasingly dependent on the cloud to get things done, collaborate, communicate, share stuff with peers and much more. Internet in fast becoming an operating system by itself with all the web apps replacing the desktop counterparts. One major thing missing out of this pretty picture is the absence of a comprehensive search feature.
Am not referring to web in general – the ability to search our own data stored in the cloud, distributed across a lot of third party datacenters. Greplin is a personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data from one easy place. Curious as to how Greplin can help autocomplete your life?
Cloud storage products are hot services these days and while there is now an abundance of them, only a handful have really built something versatile and simple enough for the masses. Dropbox is one massively popular example, which we’ve reviewed before and even listed some really creative uses for. I recently asked my Twitter following which they preferred; Dropbox or SugarSync? Without question, the majority of my followers recommended Dropbox.
The two services are very similar, however, I prefer SugarSync. While similar to Dropbox, SugarSync offers a few features not found in Dropbox. Today we’ll take a look at SugarSync and a few of the features it provides, which Dropbox doesn’t.
Microsoft has Office Live, Google has Google Docs, Apple has iWork.com, and now Adobe has their own document web application: Acrobat.com. Acrobat.com, however, provides more complete web applications than any of the other three.
Acrobat.com provides a file manager, which allows you to upload Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files and share them with others; a word processor, presentation and tables application; and online meeting. Of course, it is built in Flash.
This is an increasingly crowded field, and there is wide disagreement in how these applications should work. Apple and Microsoft’s applications serve as compliments to their desktop applications, whereas Google and Adobe’s are standalone.
Let’s take a look at Acrobat.com’s applications, and see how well they work.
Recent trends in design have led to many successful applications that focus on one thing, and one thing only. This is a promising trend as many of these applications have been able to succeed when focused in this way.
Due in part to this focus, one genre of application that has really blossomed is that of file sharing. Specifically, Dropbox has won the hearts of people all over the world. But the solid design has been implemented in other apps in this space.
Today I’d like to look at one in particular: Upload Robots.
A web tool and a desktop application all rolled into one utility, Dropbox appears to have addressed an issue that has long plagued computer users — synchronization. Developers from many of the big names in this industry have tried and failed at synchronization. In a way, it has been the holy grail of mobile computing, And yet, none of the big names were able to give users an acceptable solution.
Then Dropbox hit the scene.
