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Posts tagged with "dropbox"

Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter

It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.

Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.

Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.

I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.

Daily Notes for iPad Makes A Comeback with Tasks, Dropbox Support

Daily Notes was one of the first apps to adopt a custom interface on the iPad back in the days when iPad apps were a novelty. Reviewed by Cody Fink in May 2010 (a month after the release of the tablet, and the grand opening of the iPad App Store), the app sported an intriguing faux-leather UI that allowed you to organize and schedule your daily events and priorities as if you were using a real agenda. Cody wrote:

Daily Notes is a more traditional styled notebook with lots of calendars built in. Seriously, you cannot miss a date wherever you turn. Asides from what could be overdoing it, Daily Notes has a couple great features built in, but also shows some odd design decisions that need ironing out. Despite some minor gripes, this is probably one of the best looking notepad applications currently available on the iTunes App Store, offering a fair level of organization, note tracking, privacy, and customization.

After a few months of silence, the app is making a comeback today into the App Store with a brand new version 4.0 that comes with several new features like backup through Dropbox and TextExpander integration. Together with that (and I’m sure being able to create daily notes through TextExpander snippets will be appreciated by many) the app can now organize tasks into a dedicated tab and has full multitasking support. But there’s more. You can switch between 30 different themes and 80 fonts, browse fullscreen photo attachments and insert multiple notes per day.

Daily Notes is chock-full of features, but I wish the interface was a little more streamlined. Admittedly, some users might find sections and calendar views confusing at first – thus the implementation of a tutorial when you first launch the app. Still, this is a truly complete app that I hope will get support for more online services in the future. Go check it out here.

How To: Send Any Webpage From iOS To Your Mac Browser

Yesterday, I asked on Twitter if there was an easy way to send a webpage from the iPhone to the Mac. Currently, there are several iPhone apps that allow you to get links from your Mac browser onto the iPhone or iPad: most of them either work with a bookmarklet or browser extensions that, with just one click, let you “push”  webpages to iOS. Apps like Handoff (review) and Push The Page even work remotely with the iPhone on a 3G connection. But the other way around, iOS to Mac, is not just as easy to achieve.

In my Twitter poll, many followers recommended AirLink, a web service that, once installed on the Mac and iOS, allows you to send an receive webpages remotely. AirLink, however, requires you to visit a special webpage on your browser to retrieve the link you have shared. What I’m looking for, and what I’m sure others like me have dreaming of for a while, it’s a simple system that allows me to send with a few taps any webpage from the iPhone (on WiFi and 3G) to the Mac, and have a new browser tab open on the desktop. So when I get home, I’ll find the link I shared on iOS ready in my browser. It turns out though, this “simple system” wasn’t so simple to achieve but now, thanks to the help of my friend @MisterJack, I think I’ve got something here that just works and does exactly what I need. Most of all, it requires three taps to be activated. Read more

MacDropAny: Symlinks Made Easy

While symlinks are funny creatures (you’d never want to sync a Symlink from a Mac to a PC), they can be amazingly valuable if you’re keeping multiple Macs with equal paths in harmony. MacDropAny is a nifty Dropbox Addon that allows you to point to any folder on your computer outside of Dropbox via a symlink inside of Dropbox. It’s recommended that you don’t sync your Applications folder, but that documents folder might be nice to backup. There’s no application screenshot here: MacDropAny is so simple just a couple of menu prompts will walk you through the process.

[DropboxAddons: MacDropAny via Lifehacker]

A Great Simplenote Update: Dropbox Integration and Lists

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing a new version of Simplenote, which just went live in the App Store. The new Simplenote, which reaches version 3.1, is a huge update that adds many requested features and a great surprise from the developers: the app now comes with native Dropbox support, configurable in the Settings. Simplenote can now sync text files back to a “Simplenote” folder in your Dropbox account (you can rename it), and syncing sessions happen every several minutes, but can be triggered manually. Dropbox integration is a feature exclusive to the Premium subscription, which can be purchased for $12 a year. In my tests, Dropbox syncing has been very reliable and now allows me to natively integrate Simplenote with a plethora of other iOS and Mac word processors that support Dropbox. Read more

DropVox: Save Voice Memos to Dropbox In Seconds

DropVox is an iPhone app I discovered in the App Store over the weekend, it’s incredibly simple yet I wonder why I didn’t think of using something like this before: DropVox uploads voice memos instantly to the cloud, and more specifically to Dropbox – the service I use on a daily basis for almost anything in my workflow, from music to app libraries.

Developed by Irradiated Software (the same folks behind MacStories’ favorite Cinch for Mac), DropVox works like this: you fire it up for the first time and log in with your Dropbox account. Every time you want to record a voice memo, open the app, hit the huge Record button, then stop and wait for the file to land in your Dropbox. Boom, just like that. No file management, no renaming features, no time stamps – just record and upload.

DropVox is a microphone for DropBox. Get it now, while it’s still priced at $0.99 as a limited time offer.

Nottingham 2.0 Beta Available, Simplenote Client For The Desktop

Nottingham is a note taking application for the Mac we first reviewed more than a year ago, and lots of things have changed since then. The application went under a private beta testing stage, and Nottingham 2.0 is now finally available as a public beta. Nottingham, for those who missed it, is a desktop app that plugs into the popular service Simplenote (which we love here at MacStories) to retrieve notes stored online and continuously backed up through the cloud.

Version 2.0 of the app, released a few minutes ago, adds a completely redesigned user interface that’s heavily inspired by the iOS Notes app with yellow notebook-like background and the possibility to switch between landscape and portrait mode. The notepaper design can be disabled in the Preferences and you can switch to the Notational Velocity-like vertical layout using a button in the top toolbar. Not very intuitive at first, as it looks like a “sharing” button. The app can sync with Simplenote and pick any folder to read notes from – put the folder in your Dropbox and you have cross-platform syncing with Simplenote and Dropbox at the same time. Similarly to Notational Velocity, the app can read multiple file types and be assigned a keyboard shortcut. The app is entirely keyboard-friendly and the developers promise more features will be added in the final release.

You can download Nottingham 2.0 public beta for free here.

Notational Velocity Update: Horizontal Layout, Tag Sync, New Icon

Notational Velocity is a free and open source text editor for the Mac that can read text files from anywhere on your computer and syncs with Simplenote. Thanks to its sync functionalities, Notational Velocity became popular among users who wanted to store notes in Dropbox (from where Notational can fetch files) and sync them back to Simplenote as well. With Notational in the middle, users can enjoy the power of Dropbox text editors in the App Store, and the beauty of Simplenote’s tools.

In the past months, we have covered a couple of interesting mods to the original Notational Velocity which aimed at extending the feature set of the app by adding fullscreen mode, horizontal layout, multiple note tagging, Markdown and Textile support and lots more. Those were unofficial mods (or “forks”) realized because of the open source nature of the application. An update to Notational Velocity was released last night, and it adds a number of features seen in unofficial forks: horizontal layout (simple, reminds me of iOS), tag syncing through Dropbox with OpenMeta standard, TaskPaper compatibility, support for inter-note linking. Tags can be entered in a dedicated column of the vertical view, but I haven’t found a way to show tags while in horizontal mode. These tags have full Spotlight support as they’re based on  OpenMeta (which means they’ll also work with other Mac apps like Tags and Leap). Lots of changes and small fixes are included in this update – I appreciate the fact that notes can now be created with the “nv://make/” URL syntax and AppleScript search support. I also find the new icon more elegant and unobtrusive than the previous one.

Overall, it’s the same Notational you know and love only with a few changes, a new layout and lots of minor improvements you can check out below. Download here. Read more

Cloud Connect Pro: A Finder for iPad

iOS devices don’t have a Finder, and in many ways that’s a good thing. Apple simplified the approach to file management by making the filesystem virtually invisible to the users and delegating “database functionalities” to apps, which are nothing but containers of files, data and information. Apps like Pages, PlainText or the Photos app itself keep actual files together, it’s just that on iOS users aren’t forced to manage, organize, clean and sort them like on the desktop. It’s a simpler and more intuitive approach. For many, though, file management sometimes is necessary. Either because of an app that doesn’t support sharing (thus documents can’t get out) or working needs that require access to a specific file in a specific location, several users over the years have lamented the impossibility to have a Finder-like system on their iPhones and iPads. We have also seen apps like Berokyo trying to bring folders and files together on iOS by making compromises with iOS’ default interface style and features.

Cloud Connect Pro, a new app by Antacea I’ve been testing for the past week, aims at bringing true Finder-like options and file management capabilities to the iPad with deep cloud integration. This app can connect to any computer, Dropbox or iDisk instance and WebDAV / SFTP / FTP server to access folder structures, files and media. It can stream music and videos, double as a lightweight but useful VNC client, open and preview document and much more. Read more