So yesterday Dropbox announced that they were exiting their private beta and opening up to the public. This is awesome news! I first heard about Dropbox a while ago, at least a year ago - from a story on Reddit. I signed up to try and get in the private beta however I was too late, thousands before me had signed up and had their invites arrive in their inboxes while slow-coaches like me were left out in the online file-storage cold.
But now the team behind Dropbox have launched publicly and everyone is free to join the wonderful warmth of online file storage, file sharing and file collaboration done right - with a big dose of awesome to keep everyone sweet.
Recently Apple have released their solution to the “cloud” service, called “MobileMe”. Unfortunately they’ve been upstaged by Dropbox, by a large factor. MobileMe Apple pissed me off when they snuck it in as an unwanted and un-notified installation along with an update to iTunes, just as they evilly did with their Safari installation. I gave MobileMe a shot, as it came with a free 30 day trial - and for a time, it was good - but then came along the public release of Dropbox and since I use Zimbra the contact / calendar syncing offered by MobileMe doesn’t really appeal to me. To do a direct comparison between the two would be unfair as MobileMe has contact / calendar synchronisation, whereas Dropbox doesn’t. However the storage side of things in Dropbox walk all over the MobileMe service.
I’ve already started using it for little things which are so unbelievably handy, for example in my line of work I use screencapping / screenshots a lot. Communicating a screenshot should be an easy thing, unfortunately it tends not to be. For example, I’d take the screenshot, dump it into an image editor, crop it, save it to a folder, then sftp it to a webserver, get the URL and then IM the URL to whoever I wanted to see it. With Dropbox running it’s just a matter of saving the edited screenshot to my public folder in my Dropbox directory, right-click on it and “Copy public link” and then IM it to whoever - since Dropbox automatically uploads anything in the Dropbox folder to the Dropbox server it completely removes the need to SFTP it anywhere.
That’s just one example of the awesomeness though. I’ve got my important docs in my Dropbox folder and can work on them either on my work PC or my home PC and every time I save a change it’s automatically uploaded and replicated across all my other computers using my Dropbox account.
I’ve got my girlfriends’ entire My Documents folder as her own Dropbox and a folder under her My Documents folder is shared between us at all times, across all computers, and replicated instantly across them all. Which makes it incredibly handy any time I need to edit or view a file she’s working on etc. She can even collaborate on Excel files with another charity worker where previously Google Docs was the only other viable collaborative alternative.
Now it’s just a matter of getting Dropbox to work with CentOS 5.2 (here’s hoping!)
[Aferthought by rob on Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 2:16 pm]
I thought I’d actually make a quick mention here of humyo since I did try their service also for a while. Humyo was good, to an extent, and has probably improved since I stopped using it - however I felt it was strongly restricted due to the fact that it offered no direct file system interaction - everything was done via a web-browser. When I tried the service there was no client application which could be installed on a desktop to provide simple, direct file interaction between what’s stored on the humyo servers and what’s stored on the local workstation. I believe they’ve since introduced a drive mapping application and “sync” software which allows backup and file replication across computers. I haven’t tried their new client app, since (a) I don’t use their service any more and (b) you actually have to pay for it after your 14 day trial runs out. After the trial runs out you are back to having to do all your file management via a web browser again - or pay. Ouch. That said, humyo offer 30Gb free, compared to Dropbox’s 2Gb. To be perfectly honest, I’d much rather manage a restrictive 2Gb worth of files and folders using a transparent tool such as DropBox’s implementation than try and manage 30Gb of files and folders using a flash-based website.
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