The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide

I’m a fan of Dropbox—the cloud data sync service—and if you are too you might find something of interest in The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit & Guide over on the Appstorm site.

They’ve collected an impressive list of ways to make a valuable tool even more so, including:

• Local Area Network sync (if you have more than one computer on a LAN you can sync directly among them without going to the cloud first)
• Password sync (I use this with 1Password)
• Share photo galleries
• Sync your iTunes library across multiple computers
• Send files to Dropbox by email
• PHP Dropbox uploader
• Website file hosting and sharing

Take your files mobile with Dropbox

Here’s the idea: you’re away from your computer—Mac or PC—and you want to use your mobile device to access folders and files that are saved on your computer. A cloud sync service like Dropbox can fill that gap and provide quick and easy access to your files. I’ve been testing this for a while and it works great.

The way it works:

• You have a Dropbox account (free 2 GB account, or pay for more space).
• The Dropbox application is installed on your computer, which creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ and syncs this folder (and every folder inside it) to your online account.
• Any folders and files that you would like to be able to access on your mobile device, just move those into the Dropbox folder structure.
• Install the free Dropbox app on your mobile device, enter your login information, and have access to your online account and all of the folders and files you have synced up on your computer.

It’s important to point out that this is not some ‘virtual’ folder—the Dropbox folder and its subfolders actually exist on your computer, so it’s no different than your current folder hierarchy: your data is still stored on your hard drive. The only difference is that once a file is saved locally, a copy automagically gets pushed to the cloud. This serves several purposes:

1. A remote backup of your files. In case your computer were stolen or damaged such that you couldn’t get to your data, you could recover your files from Dropbox. This is reason enough to do it.
2. Remote access for viewing up-to-date copies of all your files when you’re away from your computer.
3. The ability to share a file with someone else, either by using the Public folder or by emailing a link to the file directly from the Dropbox mobile app.

As of this writing Dropbox mobile apps are available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and iPod Touch—according to the Dropbox Anywhere page, Blackberry support is coming as well.

I’ve found the Dropbox service and the mobile applications to be very stable and reliable so far as I have used them on iPhone and iPad. I experimented for a while with a free 2 GB account, but recently upgrade to the 100 GB service for $20 a month.

I’ve mentioned Dropbox in several blog posts—I’m not involved with the company in any way, just a satisfied customer. They’re doing a really good job.

Get a Blog / CMS

This post is focused on blogs and publishing (Content Management Systems, or CMS)—the companion piece to this is Get a Web Site where I looked at some of the products and services for creating your own site without the need to hire web designers and programmers—but there’s not too much difference these days between a web site and a blog, depending on what it is you want to do. It’s easy enough to create a space for both or just combine the two, but before you choose a technology platform it’s important to be clear about your online goals, and plan your approach from there.

Some of the options listed here will provide a hosted environment for your blog, or let you install the software on your own domain. The top blogging systems available today are outstanding in the level of functionality and control they provide, allowing anyone to publish something very sharp and professional-looking. You can’t go wrong with any of the products listed here, they are all good.

Some features to consider when planning your blog/CMS:

• Embedded video, audio, maps
• Photo galleries
• Social media integration (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc)
• Form building & data collection
• Discussion forums
• Calendar of events
• E-commerce (online product sales)
• Site analytics/stats (tracking visits to the site, pages accessed, keywords used, referring sites, etc)
• Polls/voting options
• Blog post comments
• Custom HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP
• Companion mobile-optimized app

WordPress

WordPress.org (www.wordpress.org) is the organization that develops and supports the WordPress blogging software. They don’t offer hosting on their domain, but they provide the free software and templates to install on your own web host. It’s the system I installed for this blog, and I like it a lot.

WordPress.com (www.wordpress.com) provides free hosting for your blog on their domain (yoursite.wordpress.com) if you don’t want to register and maintain your own domain.

Both of the WordPress services above offer the same technology, site templates, plugins for additional functionality (contact forms, image galleries, comment management, site statistics, etc), and support forums. WordPress is probably the most feature-complete and well-supported blogging system available today. They have done a fantastic job, especially considering they are giving it away for free.

TypePad

TypePad (www.typepad.com) is another popular blog system, with lots of well-designed templates and advanced features. They charge for their service but the prices are reasonable, starting at $9 per month which includes web hosting. TypePad supports audio, video, javascript, custom HTML, mapping to your own domain name, site statistics, and much more.

Movable Type

Movable Type (www.movabletype.com) labels itself a “Social Publishing Platform” for creating blogs, websites and social networks. I haven’t used it but it appears to be targeted to more sophisticated needs than just basic blogging and web sites. Their showcase page and client list show some of the people and organizations that publish with Movable Type. Movable Type is free for a basic version and pricing options are listed for more complex needs on this page. I think the pricing is very reasonable for a business site, considering how much this system offers.

Squarespace

I haven’t spent any time using Squarespace but I watched the product tour video and it’s very impressive, and appears to be one of the most popular blog systems going. Pricing starts at $8 per month and goes up from there, depending on feature needs. They have a nice examples page to get an idea of how people are using it.

Tumblr

Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) may be one of the easiest systems to get started with. You set up a site name — hosted on their servers or your own web host — pick a theme (template) and start posting. I like its simplicity: you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. Post text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video, slideshows, whatever. Keep it private or share it. There are some really nice design themes to choose from. Check out the Why Tumblr page for some inspiration. Cost: free.

Blogger

Blogger (www.blogger.com) was acquired by Google a couple of years ago and has a large user base. Like Weebly it uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to put various elements on the page. Access controls let you decide who can edit and publish to your site, so you can keep it to yourself or share out your blog with family or a work team. Blogger profiles let you look up others who share your interests. They also have a variety of design themes to choose from. Blogger provides the hosting, and it’s all free.

Posterous

Posterous (www.posterous.com) calls itself the “dead simple place to post everything” — for first timers, casual bloggers, social media pros, families and groups. I’ve explored Posterous a bit and it’s really simple to get a casual blog up in a matter of minutes. Free.

2010 Product Reviews and Comparisons

I found some online reviews and comparisons among blog software and CMS systems. I don’t know how authoritative this is, but it seems to be a pretty complete overview of the major systems out there.

Blogging Platforms (blog-software-review.toptenreviews.com)

1. WordPress
2. TypePad
3. SquareSpace
4. LiveJournal
5. Blogger
6. BlogHarbor
7. Xanga
8. EasyJournal
9. Open Salon
10. Vox

Content Management Systems (cms-software-review.toptenreviews.com)

1. eZ Publish
2. Joomla!
3. Drupal
4. WordPress.org
5. Movable Type
6. Expression Engine
7. Mambo
8. TextPattern
9. b2evolution
10. Frog

Apps I Use

I’ve had a few people ask me which Mac apps I use for certain things, so I made a list of some common ones and a few alternates that are worth checking out. I will update this list from time to time when there’s something noteworthy to add. Let me know if there are some good ones I’m not aware of.

Web Browser

Safari – apple.com/safari – free on every Mac, iPhone and iPad

Safari is the default web browser installed on all Apple computers. It was developed by Apple and is based on the open source WebKit codebase. Safari version 5 was recently released and I’ve found it to be very fast and stable, easily one of the best performing browsers available for the Mac.

Alternates
Firefox – mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html – free
Camino – caminobrowser.org – free

Email

Apple Mail – free on every Mac, iPhone and iPad

Like the Safari browser, Mail is Apple’s default email program installed on all Macs as part of the OS X operating system.

Word Processing, Spreadsheet & Presentation

Apple iWork – apple.com/iwork – $79

The iWork suite is Apple’s counterpart to Microsoft Office. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are equivalent apps to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I’ve just recently started using iWork as a replacement for Microsoft Office 2008 and I think it will meet my all my productivity app needs.

Alternates
Microsoft Office 2008 – microsoft.com/mac – $150 to $400
Open Office – openoffice.org – free
Google Docs & Spreadsheets – docs.google.com – free

Image Editing

Acorn – flyingmeat.com/acorn – $50

Acorn handles most common image editing needs at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. Crop, resize, rotate, add layers, text, gradients, color fill, draw, and more. It does everything I need and doesn’t bloat my hard drive with a thousand features I don’t use.

Alternates
Pixelmator – pixelmator.com – $59
Adobe Photoshop – adobe.com/products/photoshop/compare – $699 and up

FTP

Transmit – panic.com/transmit – $34

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used for uploading and managing web site files on a web server. Transmit is made by Panic (www.panic.com), a very talented Mac software shop. I’ve used Transmit for years and every upgrade just makes it better.

Exchange Email, Calendar & Contacts

Microsoft Entourage – microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2008 – $150 to $400

For connecting to an Exchange messaging environment on a Mac, Entourage is the counterpart to Outlook on Windows. It’s not exactly like Outlook, but very close in terms of functionality. It handles email, calendar, contacts and notes like Outlook. Entourage is part of the Microsoft Office 2008 suite for Mac, which also includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I’ve heard that Microsoft will be releasing Outlook for the Mac sometime in late 2010 as a replacement to Entourage.

Text Editing

TextWrangler – barebones.com/products/textwrangler – free

Bare Bones software makes the free TextWrangler as well as a premium text editor, BBEdit. BBEdit is a much more robust editing and programming environment, and sells for $125. When I was checking out BBEdit I decided to download the free TextWrangler and see what it was about, and found that it does everything I need so I’ve just kept on using it.

Alternates
BBEdit – barebones.com/products/bbedit – $125
Textmate – macromates.com – $50

Password Management

1Password – agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password – $40

I don’t know of anything comparable to 1Password for the Mac, and this is absolutely one of my most valuable and frequently-used apps. I have many logins and passwords for various web sites and applications, and 1Password keeps track of all of them. It pre-fills your logins on sites so you don’t have to manually enter anything, and will even generate new, secure logins for you and keep track of those. The app provides a convenient place for managing software licenses and serial numbers, as well as credit card info that you use to purchase online. You can keep secure notes of any kind in 1Password, and everything in the entire database is searchable. One of the best features is wireless syncing with mobile devices—I just launch 1Password on my Mac, and then launch it on the iPhone or iPad and it syncs up across devices. Fantastic app.

Photo Editing & Management

Aperture – apple.com/aperture – $199

Aperture is Apple’s pro level photo editing application. I use it for post-processing my Nikon RAW (.NEF) files, to catalog image files and various projects, assign keywords, etc. Aperture will output to various image formats and provides a tremendous amount of non-destructive editing control on source images. You can create some magnificent photo books with tools that are built right in, and purchase and upload them directly to the printer without leaving the app. Aperture is a first-rate photo editor, as is Adobe Lightroom.

Alternates
Adobe Lightroom – adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom – $299
iPhoto – apple.com/ilife/iphoto – $79

Video Editing

Final Cut Express HD – www.apple.com/finalcutexpress – $199

FCE has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s well worth it if you want to go beyond the basics and dive into some advanced video editing techniques. It falls between Apple’s entry-level iMovie and the high end Final Cut Pro, although it’s much closer to Final Cut Pro both in features and the user interface.

Alternates
iMovie – apple.com/ilife/imovie – $79

Miscellaneous Info Capture

Evernote – www.evernote.com – free limited account, $45/year for premium account

I’m not sure how to categorize Evernote, but I’m in it often because it’s really useful. I think of it as a digital bucket, a place to drop notes and receipts and books-to-read lists and films-to-watch lists and ideas and images and text clippings and the occasional something-I-want-to-save-off-the-web-but-I-don’t-want-to-bookmark-the-page kinda thing. You can organize items into separate databases, or throw them all into one database and apply custom tags to arrange things. Evernote is a cloud service so you can get to your stuff through the Evernote web site, a local app on your computer, or iPhone or iPad app—all of which sync nicely and keep your stuff and whatnot organized. Evernote also provides a unique email address for each user, so you can email things right into your Evernote database. One of my favorites.

Cloud Data Sync / Storage

Dropbox – dropbox.com – 2 GB free, 50 GB for $10/mo, 100 GB for $20/mo

Dropbox seems to be the gold standard in this space because they get a lot of positive press. Syncs with Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android. I used the free 2 GB service for a while and was impressed, so I recently upgraded to the 100 GB account.

Alternates
SugarSync – sugarsync.com – $5/mo for 30 GB up to $25/mo for 250 GB
I haven’t tried SugarSync but it looks like a good service, comparable to Dropbox. Works with Mac, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WinMo
Box.net – www.box.net – Tiered pricing, with greater focus on business and enterprise customers.

Hard Drive Cloning (Full Disk Backups)

SuperDuper – shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper – $28

This is one of the essential Mac apps. SuperDuper creates a full bootable clone of your hard drive. This is important because if your primary drive fails and is unrecognizable by the system, you can boot into another drive without missing a beat if you have a clone. I run a SuperDuper backup two or three times a week to an external firewire drive, and occasionally boot from that copy to make sure it works as expected. This is important: don’t just assume your backup is good — test it.

Alternates
Carbon Copy Cloner — bombich.com — free, donation requested

Incremental File Backups

TimeMachine — apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html — free

TimeMachine is installed as part of OS X, and functions as a file restoration backup rather than a full system restoration (see SuperDuper above). You should have both. Plug in an external drive, or set a partition on an existing drive, and tell TimeMachine to back up to it. TimeMachine will save multiple versions of a file over time, so you can go back to an earlier edit, or recover a file that you recently deleted. It works well and seldom requires user intervention. The more space you can allocate to TimeMachine, the further back your recovery options can go. I use it daily.

Hard Drive Directory Maintenance & Repair

DiskWarrior — http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior — $100

If there’s ever a serious disk error on your Mac, DiskWarrior is your best bet for recovery and repair. It will detect and fix directory errors that Apple’s own Disk Utility may not handle. Every couple of months I run it on my bootable drives and rebuild the disk directories as they become fragmented over time. DiskWarrior is generally considered to be the premier Mac disk directory utility, many people swear by it.

Work Smart, Save Money

I saw a good blog post by Jason Calacanis called How to Save Money Running a Startup — but it doesn’t just apply to startups. There are some good, practical tips on running any small organization.

A few of my favorite points from the article:

• Use Macs (reduce IT support problems, viruses, malware, etc)
• Don’t buy a phone system
• Use dual monitors (proven productivity boost)
• Outsource Accounting and HR (consider outsourcing anything you’re not good at so you can focus on what you know)
• Don’t buy Microsoft Office (there are other options)
• Allow people to work off hours (rush hour commuting is a stupid use of time)

I would add a few others about organizations large and small:

• Leverage the cloud where you can — there are some good, inexpensive online services available for email hosting, file storage, web and blog services. Reduce the amount of infrastructure that you need to directly manage.
• Don’t outsource problems or things you don’t understand.
• Get rid of the bad attitudes on your team. You know who they are, and they are costing you in ways that may not be obvious.
• Encourage creative thinking, apply it wherever you can. Good ideas are everywhere and you want to give people a reason to keep having them.
• Meetings: have an agenda and stick to it, and “discussion” is not an agenda item. Be clear about what you want to accomplish in a meeting, or don’t have one. If you schedule an hour your time is officially up after one hour, so don’t expect people to stick around beyond that. If you think you need more time to finish something, schedule it.
• Go casual. Seriously. I see people wearing suits and ties and I think they’re on their way to address the UN General Assembly, they look so important. We are paid to be effective at our jobs, and I’m not going to be more effective if I’m wearing a jacket that matches my pants, or a piece of colorful cloth wrapped around my neck. If people remember you for what you’re wearing then you’re probably not very good at what you do.

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Cloud Data Sync with MobileMe

I recently began a 60-day free trial of Apple’s MobileMe cloud syncing service. MobileMe has been around for a while but I haven’t looked into it lately, so I thought I would do the trial and see how well it works.

I don’t need sync services for email because I use the IMAP* setup on all of my email accounts. IMAP allows me to access email from a variety of devices and it will remain in sync regardless of what I use – laptop, mobile phone or web client. If I delete a message on my laptop’s email program, it’s gone when I check email on my phone.

What I want is to have my contacts and calendars remain in sync across whatever devices I use. If I update a contact record on my phone, I want that change to propagate back to my laptop and iPad automagically.

Test Results

In my initial testing MobileMe seems to work exactly as advertised. I created a MobileMe trial account** online at www.me.com, and then did the setup in my Mac’s System Preferences. From there you decide which things you want to sync — Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks, Mail Accounts, Notes, and some other options — I just selected Calendars and Contacts for now.

** (You have to enter a credit card that will be charged if you choose to continue after the trial period is over. If you don’t want to continue after the 60 days, just go into your account preferences and cancel the account and you won’t be charged.)

For testing purposes I updated a contact record on my iPhone, and in less than a minute the change showed up on the MobileMe web site, in my Mac’s Address Book and on the iPad Address Book (the Contacts app). Then I added a calendar event on the iPad, and likewise it updated quickly to my phone, iCal on the Mac and on the MobileMe site.

iDisk & Find My iPhone

The MobileMe service also includes 20 GB of online storage called iDisk. You can allocate some of this to email and the rest to file storage – I’m not using the MobileMe email account so I just set it to allow 19 GB for storage. I copied a few files into the Documents area of iDisk and it all showed up as expected, but I haven’t done any iDisk testing beyond that. The iDisk icon sets up on your desktop and works like it’s just another file system or hard drive mounted on your machine. I’ve been using Dropbox for cloud storage, and while I think Dropbox is more mature as a storage product, iDisk is a nice addition to the MobileMe suite of services. And for most individuals, 20 gigabytes of storage is plenty for a secondary cloud backup.

Find My iPhone is pretty cool, and it also works with the iPad. Once set up, it will display a map with the approximate location of your device. You can push a message to pop-up on the screen, set a passcode lock, or remotely wipe data from the device. I tested the message service, and in about 10 seconds I saw the message on my phone. This service alone might be worth the membership price.

Pricing

The MobileMe service from Apple is $99 annually for an individual, or $149 a year for a Family Pack (up to five users). Apple’s pricing details are here. For what it offers I think that’s a pretty reasonable deal. There are some free services out there for file storage and syncing, but many of them require technical gymnastics to get it all working together. MobileMe is simple to set up and seems to work well, and it appears that Apple is committed to long term cloud services – they recently invested $1 billion in a new data center in North Carolina. There’s a big cloud play of some kind happening there for Apple.

But… you can save some money buying MobileMe through Amazon. Today I see the individual user version offered for $70.89 (30% off) and the Family Pack for $101.98 (32% off). I have also seen it offered on ebay, so you can get it for less than what Apple is charging. (There’s also some speculation going around that Apple might make MobileMe free of charge in order to better compete with Google’s free cloud services (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts), although Google’s products are filled with ads while MobileMe is not.) When my free trial is up I plan to buy it from Amazon if Apple is still charging. Based on my early testing, I’m pretty sure I want to continue with the service. It looks really good so far and does what I want.

MobileMe on Windows

Apple claims that MobileMe supports Windows PCs as well as the Mac, although I haven’t tested the Windows setup myself. They say the service will work with Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Contacts in XP and Vista. You can also sync between Mac and PC if you have both systems in your home or office – this is good, because a true cloud sync service should be platform-independent, like the web.

* IMAP vs POP

Most email services support IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) setup, in addition to POP (Post Office Protocol). POP is fine if you always do your email from one machine and don’t have a need to manage your messages from multiple locations. For more on IMAP vs POP, see this article that compares the two.

iPad & Cloud 2

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com in an article on TechCrunch:

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

Major changes are underway in how we use computers and the internet, and they’re good. Flash animation is dying (as it should); HTML5 is gaining adoption; new, smarter software is being written with better user interfaces that make sense; desktops and laptops are becoming smartphones and tablets; magazines and newspapers are moving from the dead tree model to a more sustainable digital medium (I still want real books, though). Much of our data (music, video, email) will be stored in the cloud, and we will be able to sync multiple devices to a single consistent data source.

The best development to come over the next few years might be the disappearance (for most people) of file systems. Instead of dealing with individual files and folder structures, we will have apps and data. The operating system will deal with storing and organizing files and presenting them to the user in the context of how they will be used. This is an evolutionary step that will make computers much easier for non-technical people to use. It’s pretty much the way smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, etc) work now, and I expect that this model will eventually extend to most consumer-level devices.

Tonido Plug = Private Cloud

Cloud computing is getting a lot of play these days, and like everything else it has pros and cons. Perhaps the biggest downside is that you are trusting your data to a third party — their service could go offline for a while, or your data could be lost or otherwise compromised. Probably not likely with a reputable service since they have much to lose in that scenario as well, but it’s an obvious risk.

The Tonido Plug is a small $99 appliance that provides a way to set up a private server that you can share among others in your home or office, and also access over the internet (access is secured via password). The device plugs into your internet router via standard Ethernet cable, and also has a USB port for attaching an external hard drive (or even a small thumb drive). This is the NAS (Network Attached Storage) concept.

I like this approach for a home or small office that doesn’t want to invest in (or really need) a full-scale server machine for sharing files among a family or work team.

It comes with built-in software for:

• File-sharing
• Music streaming of your MP3s from your browser
• Blog / Journal
• Photo-sharing
• Search (your computer)
• Money Management

So the real upshot of this device seems to be that you can store your files and access them from any computer on the internet, as well as share files out selectively with others. Attach an external USB drive and you have your own private cloud on the internet.

280 Slides: Web-based Presentations

Another good example of desktop software making the transition to the web.

280 Slides is a web-based application for creating PowerPoint-type presentation slides. The designers and developers have done a terrific job of making this look and feel like a desktop program — you almost don’t notice that it’s running in a web browser. You can insert images, videos, text and notes, and choose from several themes and layouts for your presentation.

When you finish your presentation you have a few options for saving, sharing and publishing:

• Download it as a PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) file, PowerPoint 2004 (.ppt), Open Document (.odp) or PDF file
• Email it as a PowerPoint document
• Publish it to Slideshare
• Create a permanent web link to the presentation and embed it in a web page or send the link to others

I made a quick sample presentation (below), saved it, copied the embed code and dropped it into this page. Super easy.

Fremium + Moore’s Law × Murphy’s Law

Brief but good interview here with Evernote CEO Phil Libin by Todd Sattersten.

“For a new startup company, multiply Moore’s Law by Murphy’s Law: The number of things that can go wrong will double every year.”

Evernote is one of many tech companies working off the Fremium model, which basically means that you offer something of value for free, with a premium version for customers who are willing to pay for more. The Fremium business model assumes three things:

1. Your free product is good enough for casual use, and will get people talking about you
2. Your premium product is good enough to entice (and retain) paying customers who want more
3. There are enough paying customers to support the freeloaders casual customers and generate a profit

I freeloaded evaluated Evernote’s free service for a short while before upgrading to the paid account. I wrote a bit about it here last summer and I’m still a big fan of their service. I like having a digital bucket to drop things in, knowing that I can get to them from my laptop, my phone, or from any computer on the web. Evernote has executed well on the Fremium idea.