Dropbox posts

I make part of my living as an Apple consultant, so one of the first thoughts that went through my mind on Wednesday when I first saw the iPad was "would I be able to use that to help support my clients?" After a bit of thought yesterday while waiting for files to be loaded onto a new server I was installing, I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Usually when I'm visiting my clients, I lug along a computer bag filled with various tools along with my MacBook Air. The rest of the time, I'm either in my office with my iMac, or away from a Mac enjoying myself. Unfortunately, Mac issues tend to arise at the worst possible times, and so there are many situations where I only have my iPhone available for support.

One of my tricks of the trade is to talk with clients while looking at their Mac screens using a remote support tool, and the iPhone screen has always been too small to be useful. When you're trying to control someone's computer through Jaadu VNC or some other remote control software, screen real estate is very helpful. I can see using the iPad for remote support in many situations where an iPhone just won't work.

Gizmodo has an interesting story from David Quinlan, a coder who decided to sit down over a weekend with a few friends to crank out an iPhone app. It's an excellent read, not only for the little quirks and tips about organizing a collaborative project very quickly (they sketch out features and then prioritize them, and use Dropbox to keep all the files in the right places), but for the sheer push of how you actually go from idea to concept to code and finally to released iPhone app.

I won't say it sounds easy -- these guys had a good amount of experience at development and releasing software even before they started work on this app, and if you sit down with Erica's book [Amazon link to the 2nd edition, PDF downloadable version] and hope to release your very first piece of code after just a weekend of solo work, it's not going to happen. But it definitely sounds possible -- the iPhone's development platform is relatively easy to pick up (especially if you're already experienced with coding in other languages), and Apple's release process is open to anyone willing to spend the $100 to become an official developer.

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about syncing photo libraries, compressing and transferring large files, creating a virtual PDF printer, increasing screen readability, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify).

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I'm always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may still be there) and from the sound of a recent post, he must have arrived well before part of his luggage did. The result? He had a lot of photos on his iPhone that needed to be moved to his Mac, and didn't have a USB cable to link the two.

His solution? Use Dropbox and the hotel's Wi-Fi connection instead of emailing photos and then saving the attached photos to a folder on your Mac. The simple answer involves making sure that you have a Dropbox account (doesn't everybody?), the Dropbox iPhone app [Free, iTunes Link], and access to a Wi-Fi network.

Within the Dropbox app, tap on the Camera button, then tap Existing Photo or Video. From the iPhone's photo albums, you can send your photos to any one of the folders in your Dropbox. As Jeff points out in his post, this has the added benefit of making sure that your vacation photos are backed up online.

Once you've moved the photos to your Dropbox, it's a simple matter of moving or copying them over to your Mac's photo library by literally clicking and dragging them (or option-clicking and dragging if you want to make a copy and keep the originals in the Dropbox) to the iPhone app icon in the dock.

There's only one issue; you have to move one photo or video at a time with the current version of the Dropbox app. Let's hope that Dropbox can address that in an upcoming version of the app.

[Tip of the travelin' hat to Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer]

When using your iPhone to access your files, you really have two options. First, some apps let you copy files to your phone for later viewing. In the second option, a service such as Dropbox or MobileMe allow you to access a subset of your files. However, none of these options cure I-completely-forgot-to-grab-the-sales-presentation-before-leaving-itis.

Here, File File! wants to make it incredibly easy for you to access any file from anywhere. By using a small application running on your Mac, HFF is able to do just that. The app provides user authentication and SSL encryption, as well as content-on-demand to prevent any eavesdropping on your file-access activities.

While the app isn't available yet, you can get a good idea of how it will work in the video above. In the video you can see how HFF will allow you to view all of your folders and connected volumes, as well as the files within them. This even includes the ability to stream movies and music. Furthermore, you can attach a file to an email and send it to someone else, or for particularly large files you can send a unique, randomly-generated download link via email.

According to the developers of Here, File File!, the app will be available in January for your downloading pleasure. Until then you can peep the video or sign up to be notified when HFF is released.

All new Macs come with great bundled software. Between the iLife suite, Safari, iTunes, and TextEdit, plus the ability to access and use cloud applications for free, almost all of the most basic modern computing needs get met for most users.

That said, having used four different Macs over the past seven years, there are several applications that don't come with OS X that I find myself immediately loading onto a new Mac. Most of these are big-name apps that you've probably already heard of, but it's still pretty amazing how much extra functionality you can eke out of a Mac with only ten additional programs, and all of them (save the last one) are free.

Whether you're buying a new Mac for a relative this holiday season or getting a new one for yourself, these are ten applications you should download as soon as that shiny new machine loads the desktop for the first time.

Since iWeb comes with just about every Mac, it's surprising that it isn't used by more Mac users. For some people, coughing up US$99 a year for MobileMe hosting is the barrier, but there are other ways to get your iWeb pages out where the world can see them.

Last night, while participating in a recording of the MacJury podcast, one of my gift ideas was to sign somebody up for a free trial of Dropbox and show them how to use it for syncing all sorts of things. While I was touting all of the things that Dropbox can be used for, I pulled up the Dropbox wiki for reference, and I noticed a link for Tips and Tricks. One of the tips was "Use Dropbox to host a website."

iWeb is one of my personal specialties, so I immediately wondered if someone could use Dropbox to host an iWeb site. Within two minutes, I had my answer and an idea for a how-to post. Follow along as I show you how to publish your iWeb site on a free Dropbox account.

Note: As our commenters point out, even though the suggestion for website hosting comes direct from the Dropbox wiki, the service is not intended for 'production' web hosting. A few personal pages or a testing site shouldn't cause you any grief, but Dropbox does reserve the right to turn off your public links if the system detects unusual levels of bandwidth consumption.

Every time I walk through Warehouse Stationery (New Zealand's equivalent to Office Depot) or Dick Smith's Electronics (pretty much Best Buy), I'm struck by how probably half the products in each store are pretty much useless to me since I've got an iPhone.

Thanks to the apps that come pre-packaged with the iPhone and the more than 100,000 third-party offerings now available in the iTunes Store, the iPhone has gained functionality that might have seemed hard to fathom under three years ago when Steve Jobs first announced the device.

"A widescreen iPod with touch controls... a revolutionary mobile phone... a breakthrough internet communications device... these are not three separate devices. This is one device." So Steve Jobs told us all back at Macworld Expo 2007. But since then, the iPhone has grown to be much more than just those three concepts.

What follows is a sort of anti-buyer's guide, a list of products and devices that you may never need or even want to buy again (or receive as a gift) if you have an iPhone. Some of these are certainly open for debate, but more than a few of them are products that, for all intents and purposes, are completely unnecessary if you have an iPhone. (Items in bold also apply to the iPod touch).

One of the great torments of owning several computers is keeping all of your personal data in sync; having multiple copies of the same application speak the same jive. Take The Hit List, for example. I use this app on my MacBook Pro at work for organizing tasks and collecting thoughts like a virtual inbox to my brain. At the end of the day I need a way to get all the day's notes from my laptop into my home desktop, which also happens to be running THL as well. What to do?

The ideal solution is to get each machine sharing the same THL database file synced to the cloud, instead of a locally rooted file. Fortunately, there is an way to do just this, and all that is required is for each machine to be running Dropbox. By now all of you should be using this amazingly awesome free service for saving and sharing data to the cloud. If you haven't yet opened an account, and downloaded and installed the Mac desktop client, go now. It's ok, I'll wait. Got it? Good, now let's do this.

First, you need to locate THL's main database file which can be found hiding in /Users/userprofile/Library/Application Support/The Hit List. Look for a file called The Hit List Library.thllibrary. Find it? Good, now simply drag this file to your Dropbox folder. Hold on, we're not quite done yet. Here's where the magic happens.

Hold down the option key while launching The Hit List. A dialog window will appear, asking what the hell you've just done with its library. Just select "Choose Library" and point it the file located in your Dropbox folder. You must repeat this part of the process on every machine running THL. That's it!

There is one small caveat. It's a good idea to always ensure that Dropbox has fully synced all of your local changes before loading THL on another machine, or else you risk losing your most recent data. Be wise to this and you'll have no troubles at all. You're welcome.

By the way, if you use Things rather than The Hit List for your task management, be sure to see our previous post about how to sync it using Dropbox as well.

Before Snow Leopard was released, we were enjoying GrabUp for super-simple sharing of screenshots. It was a great little utility: After a brief setup, it automatically sent any screenshot to its servers (or your own) and added the resulting URL to the Clipboard. It was fast and very useful.

Snow Leopard killed it by changing the naming convention of screenshots. The developers haven't fixed it (in fact, Google now throws up a danger warning when I try to access the site) and it looks like they aren't going to. We posted a fix not too long ago, and today we found another approach on the Dropbox wiki that uses Dropbox and Jing. You get free online storage for up to 2GB of screenshots, and an easy way to get the URL of your screenshot where you need it in a hurry.

Here's how it works. First, download and install Jing (it'll work with the free version -- more on that later) and get a Dropbox account (again, the free version will work). Once your Dropbox install is all done, create a destination folder in your Dropbox's Public folder -- maybe "screenshots," for example. Now it's time to fill in the Jing preferences. Read on...

About 13GB of data was accidentally deleted from my account on my Mac yesterday. Fortunately, due to an aggressive backup system, I was able to recover all of the files.

I was trying to test out a tip sent to the TUAW team, which led me to log into (and out of) the "Guest" account several times. One of the logins seemed to hang, which triggered a memory about a data loss bug in Snow Leopard which I had read about (and which Apple is now acknowledging in "extremely rare" cases, per Cnet). I immediately reached around the back of my iMac and shut it down.

At first I thought everything was OK, but then Dropbox started asking me to configure settings, as if it was the first time the app was run. Fortunately, due to the new "LAN sync" feature in recent Dropbox betas, the iMac copied my Dropbox files from my MacBook Pro on the same network in a matter of seconds, rather than having to download almost 2GB of data from Dropbox's servers.

I thought that was the end of the problems, until I saw that my Terminal customizations were missing. Then I noticed that a few other applications were not functioning correctly. Suddenly I realized that I had most likely suffered more data loss than was immediately obvious.

Read on to see what had to be done to recover after the data loss occurred.

If you've been waiting patiently for the Dropbox app [iTunes link] to hit the App Store, your wait is over. The app has arrived, and brings with it the simplicity that Dropbox users have come to know and love.

Since Dropbox itself is a free service, it's a pleasant surprise to see a simple, easy method for creating a new Dropbox account right off the bat if you don't happen to already have one. The app just asks for a name, e-mail address and password, prompts you to accept the terms of service, and creates the account. During my testing, I did encounter a problem where I would receive a nondescript "Account creation failed (null). Please try again." message, which I'm guessing may be due to high load on their servers. Still, this is not an encouraging encounter for new users.

Once logged in, everything worked pretty smoothly. On first login, You are presented with a brief welcome document that highlights some of the features of the app. Backing out of the document will take you to your Dropbox, which quickly lists any of the files and folders you may have in there. The app features built-in document preview for several types of files, including PDFs, text documents, spreadsheets, pictures and videos. You can also tag files as a favorite by tapping the star at the bottom of the file viewer, which adds the item to the favorites panel and caches a copy locally on the device so that it's immediately available.

An unexpected feature is the ability to take pictures, video, or use existing media and upload them directly to the Dropbox. This could definitely be handy if you need to take a quick video and have it available on another machine without having to plug in your phone and wait for it to sync. Also unexpected, but incredibly welcome, is the massive amount of documentation that is available from inside the app's settings panel. In addition to giving you general details about your account, the settings panel offers a link to watch a video about how Dropbox works, take a tour of the features, or browse their complete online help library, without having to leave the app. As many apps fall short in this area, it's refreshing to see such detailed documention available, let alone right from the app.

A couple of side notes: As I mentioned above, the new user signup does not appear to work properly sometimes. I'm guessing this will be fixed in short order, though. You can log out of your Dropbox account by tapping the Unlink iPhone from Dropbox button on the settings panel, but beware that you will loose any favorites you have stored (the app does warn you of this). And finally, when you do logout of your account, the app just disappears from the screen, as if it crashed, although you are successfully logged out. In my eyes, these are minor issues (well, aside from the signup problem), and will likely be addressed with future updates, but still good to watch out for.

All in all, this is a very well done, simple app that connects you with an already great (and free) service. It's available now in the App Store for free.

1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs.

The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the backups area. I'm not usually one to comment on such things, but we weren't talking about "love handles," 1Password's backups had gone from 1MB to 21MB literally overnight. On August 28th, the backups were 1MB, and on August 29th, the backups were suddenly 21MB.

Wait? Did you say August 28th? Isn't that when Snow Leopard was released? Yes it was. And wasn't that when you switched from 1Password version 2 to 1Password version 3? Yes it was. Could that have something to do with it?

I contacted 1Password's excellent support staff who correctly diagnosed that the increase was related to the preview images which are used for Login and Software License icons. (These can be found in the 1Password.agilekeychain/a/default/thumb folder.) Each preview image take about 100K. With 600+ items in my agilekeychain, this quickly added up.

Fortunately, this is easily fixed. If disk space is a concern, the icons and previews can be deleted using 1Password > Preferences > General > Remove all icons and previews. I also unchecked the box next to "Automatically download icons and previews for new Logins." After I did that, the backup size went from 21.5MB to 889KB!

Why worry about space with today's hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus <1MB. Personally I neither use nor need the icons, so it's no loss to me, and it makes a big difference.

Many thanks to the 1Password folks for helping me get to the bottom of this mystery!

Yesterday I wrote about my love of the Mac mini. So dependable and unobtrusive, it's the Honda Civic of computers. In the post, I briefly described how we use Dropbox to send routinely-updated Keynote files to the mini. A few of you wrote to ask for details, so I decided to share that information here on the blog. We use two pieces of software: Dropbox and iCal.

Dropbox

Here's the setup. First, the Mac mini is connected to the projector in the Projection Room above the theater via DVI. Every day, it runs a slideshow before the orientation film. That slideshow contains sponsorship information, museum news, etc.

It's updated once a week or so by someone in the art department (we'll call her "Janie"). Janie's desk is a couple hundred yards and two buildings away from the Projection Room. The Keynote file lives in a Dropbox folder that both Janie's PC and the mini can access. Of course, we don't want Janie editing the slideshow while it's running before a room full of guests. That's where iCal comes in.

iCal

We stop showing the film at 4:00 PM and Janie arrives for the day at 9:00 AM, so we set up two repeating iCal events.

The first event launches the slideshow in the morning. Every weekday at 8:45 AM (doors open at 9:00), there's a repeating iCal event with an alarm set to open the slideshow where it lives in Dropbox. Note that the show has been set to run at launch and loop indefinitely in Keynote.

What about updating? Easy. We stop running the slideshow at 4:00 PM and Janie leaves for the day at 5:00 PM. A second repeating iCal event has an alarm that runs the following super-simple Applescript:

Tell application "Keynote"
quit
End tell

The script does just what you expect -- it kills Keynote. This runs at 4:05 PM each weekday, and frees Janie to spend 10 or 15 minutes updating the file from her PC just before she goes home. The next morning, the first iCal event re-launches the slideshow and the cycle repeats.

That's how two free pieces of software (iCal and Dropbox) combine with an inexpensive, consumer level one to create a simple and effective solution to a problem. Best of all, it doesn't require a computer science degree or even a week with a giant manual. The iCal events and script are invisible to Janie. All she knows is, "I open the folder on my PC, change the slideshow, hit Save and I'm done." Sure, we could have dumped it on a central server, set up some sort of FTP voodoo that would have given Janie a headache, etc. But why? If the simple solution works, use it.

If you try something similar, let me know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who asked about this.