Yesterday a reader  dropped me an email, asking me what was so breakthrough about Cloud.app when CTU has been a menubar file sharing app way long before the cloud.  What, CTU? , I asked.

Yes, here it is: the 100th site of its kind.

Wether I can’t really understand the webpage title, I must admit that this CTU is quite interesting. I mean, it seems Cloud: a selected file, a menubar icon, a link. But - there’s a big but - it’s not Cloud.

Now, as you can see from the screenshot above, the webpage requires you to login with your Google username: ok, pretty weird choice but we move on. Once you’ve logged in, you can download the app and view the “web interface” of the application.

As you fire up the Uploader App, you’ll immediately notice that:

1- the icon is cute;

2- there are only two options;

3- there are no Preferences.

While it’s pretty clear that the app retrieves the login details stored in the Login Keychain, I’d like to focus on these two features the app has: Send Selected Finder Items and Send Screen Clipping. With two simple keyboard shortcuts (Cmd + Shift + 2 and Cmd + Shift + 5) you can upload files / screenshots to the web interface but - remember - they will be deleted after two weeks. This could be a big downside, but it’s ok if you need to share a file “on the go”.

The biggest deal about CTU, anyway, is that the assigned url will be pasted in the clipboard as soon as you start uploading, not at the end of the process. Neither Cloud.app has this kind of feature, by now. But - and this is a bigger but- this happens because CTU doesn’t shorten your link but simply attaches the filename at the end of a standard  http://getctu.com/123/456 url. This is not good.

Once in the web interface, you can only delete and copy items’ links, until their expiration. And this is CTU.

Now, I hope that the developers will improve and fix many, many things considering what Cloud.app is bringing to the desktop file sharing scene.

By now, CTU is only a simple alternative with a few interesting features.