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dropbox
Blogs are supposed to be about writing. Real, authentic, personal, heartfelt writing. The very word blog comes from the words web and log, a log of your thoughts on the web. But by and large, blogs have gotten complicated. 15 million widgets, word clouds, flashing ads, and more drive most people to just use social networks and forget the mess and confusion of blogging.
If installing WordPress on your hosting account or tweaking a Tumblr account to your liking sounds like more trouble than it’s worth just to publish your thoughts on the web, then get ready for a breath of fresh air. How about just saving plain text files with Markdown formatting to a folder in Dropbox, and having them published directly online? That’s what Calepin offers.
Cloud-based storage services have made sharing large files easier. In the past, most people had to copy files to Zip disks or burn documents to a DVD or save them to a flash drive. Alternatively, you can send your files via FTP, or attach it to an email message if it’s small enough. These solutions are great, but the average Internet users might not understand FTP and most mail servers reject large files.
Dropbox has become the most popular cloud-based storage service for a number of reasons. We use it to store all sort of files and share folders with others, but not everyone use DropBox. That’s where AirDropper comes in. It’s a simple application that lets you request files using a special link that you can send by email, or a personalized web page. The recipient then hits that link to upload their file using the AirDropper website; the file will be saved in your Dropbox account. It’s a great solution to an age-old problem of sending large files, so let’s take a look and see if this will be a fit for your team’s file sharing needs.
Have you ever tightened a screw in with a key? Or pried a nail out of wood with pliers? Or, perhaps, made a stand for a book or iPad out of a hanger? Chances are, at some time or another, most of us have improvised when we needed a tool but didn’t have one on hand. We’ve emailed files to ourselves before Dropbox, or use the to-do list in Gmail to save quick notes, or pasted text into the search box in a browser to keep it for a few seconds. Just like a monkey stacking boxes to grab a banana, we’re pretty ingenious at getting stuff done with whatever we’ve got at hand.
It’s always interesting to see how others put apps to use. Odds are, each of us use Gmail and Dropbox and other popular tools in slightly different ways. Here’s some of my favorite unique ways to use web apps in ways they weren’t originally designed for. If you’ve got another great way to use a web app in a unique way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments at the end!
When Dropbox was founded in 2007, many people assumed it would be a flop along with the dozens of other file sync and sharing apps that had cropped up since the internet bubble of the ’90′s. Today, however, more people than ever rely on cloud sync and sharing services to keep their digital lives in order. From making sure you can get to that important file from your smartphone to sending PSDs to your colleague on the other side of the globe, keeping your files synced in the cloud can be very useful.
Dropbox is far from the only syncing service that’s popular today. Some recent security concerns with the service have brought increased focus on SpiderOak, a privately encrypted file sync service. Then, services like Skydrive and Box.net continue to be popular with others. Additionally, computer backup services like Backblaze, Mozy, and Carbonite continue to gain popularity with people who want to make sure they never lose any files.
Syncing individual files and folders may become outdated, however. Apple promises to do more than just sync files with their upcoming iCloud service. Instead of syncing traditional folders, iCloud promises to keep the same data in your apps, automatically. On the other hand, high quality web apps like Google Docs, Lucidchart, and more let us create and store files directly in the cloud, without ever having files on our desktop to sync.
So how about you? Do you keep all of your documents in Dropbox, or do you backup regularly with Backblaze? Or are all of your files in online apps already?
Unfortunately, for the Apple-consuming public, iCloud won’t be hitting us until the fall. That means we’re going to have to wait several months because all the cloud-based syncing magic becomes a reality for us. However, either for those going crazy in anticipation, or those who oddly despise Apple, there’s a range of online services that offer similar functionality.
In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at some of the apps you can grab right now to help build up an iCloud-esque ecosystem for yourself. (more…)
Last week at Apple’s annual WWDC, Steve Jobs took the stage during the keynote address to unveil Apple’s latest product: iCloud. The successor of .Mac and MobileMe, iCloud was pitched as the unifier between Apple’s disparate computing devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Macs. With it, your data would be accessible anytime, no matter which of your devices you’re using.
After giving an initial description of the service, Jobs went on to describe the his views on files and the cloud around 82 minutes into the keynote:
Now some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky, right? And you take a bunch of stuff, and you put it in your Dropbox or your iDisk or whatever, and it transfers it up to the cloud and stores it. Then you drag whatever you want back out and store it on your devices.
We think it’s way more than that, and we call it iCloud.
~ Steve Jobs, June 6, 2011
Traditional hard drives have their advantages. With a traditional hard drive, you own it and it’s your responsibility to maintain it. If you loose it or it falls into the wrong hands, that’s it. However, that also means that you have a much lower risk of your data being passed on or being compromised virtually. The cloud offers it’s own advantages too. You can access your data anywhere and the recent announcements of the retail launch of Google’s Chromebooks are just a testament to this. You can login to any Chromebook and instantly have your data available.
Dropbox is perhaps the biggest and most popular web app for data storage in the cloud, however, it’s recently been facing some security issues for it’s users. In a letter to the FTC, University of Indiana research Christopher Soghoian claimed that while Dropbox encrypted their files, the policy could be reversed by employees, reports PC World. It’s Soghoian’s view that Dropbox have been deceiving in the level of encryption offered.
For most of us, Dropbox has become one of the one app we can’t imagine living without. Sure, we need to write documents, edit pictures, render movies, keep up with todo lists, email, and more, but if you can’t get to your data, you might as well have not made it. Founder Drew Houston imagined Dropbox as a box to store all of your files, so you wouldn’t have to keep up with flash drives any more. But even better than flash drives, it keeps your files synced between all of your computers and the cloud, so you’ll never lose that important file.
Best of all, you can share folders with others. I’ve shared folders with coleagues around the globe, which lets us send documents and pictures back and forth as easily as if we were in the same room. It’s transformed the way many of us think about files. For me, I keep my Documents, Pictures, and Music folders synced with Dropbox, and it’s the primary place I store most of my files, program settings, and more
So, how important is Dropbox to you? Do you use it enough to upgrade to a Pro account? Do you have your main Documents folders synced with it, and do you share folders with others? Or have you found an even better tool to sync your files that all of us are missing out on? Enter your choice in the poll, then we’d love to have you join the conversation in the comments below! (more…)
We all know how great Dropbox is and the many, many different ways it can be used to simplify your life. As great as Dropbox is, there are ways it could be even better and JotForm has done just that.
JotForm has made it drop dead simple to create a form you can simply link to or embed elsewhere that allows people to submit files directly to your Dropbox account! We’ll take a look at how easy this is and why you’ll want to use it, so read on!
We are living in the Information Age and today one of the most important things to most of us is our data. If our computers, tablets, phones, or other devices disappeared, or the webapps we depend on shut down tomorrow, the files we lose would be harder to replace than the things themselves. From pictures to music to the new web app you’ve been creating, we’re keeping more data than ever and all of it is stuff you want to access anytime, anywhere, without ever losing it.
The good news is there are many apps today to help keep your data synced and safe. Dropbox is one of the most popular file sync apps ever, but SpiderOak is another promising offering that helps ensure your data is safe and secure as well.
We’re going to take a deeper look at what both of these services offer and then hopefully you can decide if Dropbox, SpiderOak, or another service is the one you need to keep your data synced and safe.
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