Welcome to the first in a 30 day series on applications that I find useful in everyday life. This list will include apps for the iPhone, iPad, as well as the Mac. While a lot of these applications are Mac based many are cloud based and have PC clients that work very similar to the Mac clients.
Day 1 Dropbox
This fantastic app is more of a service and one that I increasingly use everyday. The premise behind Dropbox is the ability to share your files with anyone through the internet the other great advantage is you are creating back up copies online. How Dropbox functions is really simple. You register for the service and install the application on your computer. Once you have completed the steps here is where the magic starts. Dropbox installs a series of folders that are duplicated online. This folder is located in your user folder.
My Computer:
Online:
Now anything you place in your Dropbox folder is uploaded to the internet. If you need to share a file place the file in the public folder.\
Each of the files placed in this folder will have a unique url that allows it to be shared with everyone. To find the URL command or right click on the file and chose Dropbox and then copy Public Link.
This will copy a link to your clipboard a link that can then be pasted into an email or any document and shared. These links never change so as long as you do not change the filename you can continue to save changes. From a distribution standpoint this allows you to keep a file updated and share the new version without sending out new links every time.
Another great feature is the ability to share folders with users. This becomes your private sandbox and each file is available to both users. Once you have shared a folder Dropbox even tracks changes for you. It is really enjoyable to change a file and someone know that you have changed it and they immediately (once the file has transferred through the internet) can open it. You can also use this to distribute changes to a group of computers. How we use this is while handling the AV for BendFilm we install the application on all computers that we may need to update any videos on. We use the same login in credentials on all the boxes which Dropbox allows. This allows us to make a quick update to all computers that are connected to the internet by simply placing the file in the right folder and again once transferred through the internet all computers now have that change.
Dropbox also has great iPhone and iPad clients and have opened their API up to programmers and that integration has found its way into apps like GoodReader for the iPad. This is a great way to quickly transfer files to or from the iPad or iPhone. In the picture below you can see how you can place a file in a pictures folder on the iPad and transfer it to your Dropbox folder by clicking on the plus icon in the bottom left and choosing an existing photo or video. This is limited to posting to Dropbox of photos and videos due to the iPad architecture, but hopefully this will open up to additional files that may be stored.
For a complete list of features check out their website.
