There’s been an interesting debate with my followers on Twitter these days: which one is the best uploading / quick sharing app for Mac? Going deeper, the fight was between Cloud, “the wet dream of every Mac user” which is still in private beta, and Tinygrab, the application powered by the latest MacHeist nano bundle.
I’m totally against useless internet fights but you know, it’s an interesting subject worth an in-depth article.
Cloud
Cloud is a new application which allows to quickly share almost everything in your Mac: pictures, Photoshop files, URLs. Cloud is lovely, it has a nice cloud icon which sits in the menubar and has a unique, system-wide shortcut for uploading stuff to “the cloud”. Read my exclusive preview here if you missed it.
If you’ve got the chance of beta testing Cloud.app in this past month, you’ve probably understood all its potential and why it could become one of the best sharing applications for Mac OS X. I repeat, one of the best application to share stuff. Cloud is not an application meant for uplaoding and permanently host files. Indeed, the beta version allows you to upload files up to 5MB per file, but maybe this will change when the app will go public and the developers will start charging for the service.
Moreover, with the future update a web interface for managing uploaded files it’s rumored to come, but I still believe Cloud isn’t meant for hosting files.
When you upload something to the cloud you’re given a short url that looks this http://cld.ly/41euz and, when opened in the browser, displays your file. Now, let’s do a quick experiment: choose a picture or take a screenshot and upload it with Cloud. Here’s mine: http://cld.ly/03ev1. Open it with your browser. See the screenshot? Try to save it to your desktop and you’ll notice that it saves fine, with the same name the screenshot had before. Cool. Now, try to display the image address. Yeah the image address, the one with the file extension.
No, you can’t.
When you’ll try to get the full image address Cloud will give always give you the cld.ly url.
But why should users actually bother about getting the full address? You’re right, 80% of Cloud users won’t bother about this. But let’s say the other 20% is composed by bloggers using Cloud.app and let’s say Cloud is a hosting service, No, this doesn’t work.
Bloggers need the full image address.
I tried Cloud as a way to upload pictures to MacStories and it worked fine. But then I noticed something: when tryin’ to implement the fancybox effect (the one you can see above on the Cloud icon) to the pictures, it didn’t work. This happened because the fancybox is activated via the class=”fancybox” string in the html, and this string should be inserted after the href=”” of the image full path. But Cloud doesn’t give you the full adress so you can’t link an image to itself. And as you can guess, many other WordPress image plugins / tecniques need the full path to the image.
And this means Cloud isn’t meant to be a hosting service for - say - bloggers, but a sharing app for everyone.
When asking the developers some weeks ago about this “full address” thing they replied just as I thought: “Cloud is an application to quickly share stuff”. And look, that’s perfectly fine to me: I daily share tons of stuff with friends and co-workers and since that Cloud invite arrived in my inbox things changed. It’s so much better now. But as I said, I can’t use Cloud with MacStories pictures.
Which leads me to another application, Tinygrab.
Tinygrab (which Andy reviewed here) is a very popular application available for Mac and Windows which lets you share and upload pictures. Yes, Tinygrab is both a sharing and uploading service. You can automatically share any screenshot you take on your Mac with the default shortcuts (Cmd + Shift + 3/4) which will be given an url like this http://grab.by/wZC.
Pretty much what Cloud does, but Tinygrab is public and it already has a web interface. And it’s got a Free and a Premium (paid) service, see the image below for a comparison.
Now, Tinygrab can do many things Cloud does (short url, automatic uploads, dropdown menu) and it’s just your preference to decide which one to use. But, you should know what are the differences anyways. First, Tinygrab doesn’t have a view counter and thumbnails in the menubar dropdown. Cloud app does. Tinygrab has sounds notifications, possibility to directly open a url in the web browser after an upload, and can also automatically move a file to a desired folder (most likely trash) when the upload is complete. Cloud app don’t. But these are details„ and it’s useless to have just a lists of differences, pros and cons.
What really makes Tinygrab different from Cloud.app is the FTP support. Playin’ around with the Preferences you’ll notice that you can set up your own FTP server to receive stuff uploaded with Tinygrab. And this mean you can host stuff on your server using Tinygrab as a desktop uploader. For this reason, I can use Tinygrab as a simple yet powerful screenshot taking application which automatically uploads pics to my server and returns a complete url to the image. Basically, it lets me save a lot of time in my workflow. Please notice that Tinygrab’s short url grab.by acts just like Cloud.
I don’t know if Cloud will ever support uploads to your own FTP server. Just as I don’t know if Tinygrab will ever let you see live previews of the stuff you’ve uploaded in the menubar. The fact is they could perfectly live together. They are in the end different services with a few similarities, but this doesn’t mean “you copied me” or “I was the first”. Nah, stop it guys. And if the problem is money (like I guess it is..and yes, I’m talking to you developers) you should focus on making your product unique and explain users why they should use both. Just like I do. When Cloud app will go paid / premium / whatever I’ll pay for that, just as I would do if Tinygrab will ever revoke premium access to those who downloaded it via MacHeist.
This is not a war, it’s about choosing the right applications for your workflow. Cloud & Tinygrab are the right apps for the tasks I have to accomplish. Everyone who’ll say “Cloud ftw !!11!” or “Tinygrab RULEZ” is a jackass.
No one needs a winner.
We just want good apps.
