Dropbox Update - www.deannorman.com

Dropbox Update

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Written by Dean Norman
Tuesday, 01 July 2008
So I've been working with Dropbox a little bit and found some good uses and smaller things to work on. I've been itching to use Dropbox since I got a beta invite. I've been given 10 invites to spread around and used one so far. With 9 left, email me if you want one. I have noticed, though, that the one I sent out hasn't gotten responded to by Dropbox ie they didn't actually send the invite as of the publishing of this post. Initial install of Dropbox on my iMac was typical except for one thing. Normally when installing programs your computer password is requested upon initiation of the installation. I don't remember an initial request which I didn't notice until toward the end of the installation when I WAS prompted. Right after that I was taken to my system preferences pane and specifically "Growl". Prior to installing Dropbox I was not familiar with Growl, but I've deduced that it just brings up layers in the upper right hand corner of your screen when processes are completed similar to Google Notifier but Google Notifier doens't require Growl.(?) I must say it made me a little nervous that Dropbox was messing with any of my system preferences, but I'm sure other programs do it as well. Feel free to correct me on this. Things I've used Dropbox for so far: At the restaurant we print menus nightly depending on what we're out of and what the chef wants to make. I published the menu to my public Dropbox file and anyone I've sent the link to can download the latest version. It occurs to me that this would be much more useful if Dropbox were publicly available (currently in beta) I would be able to share that folder with other people's accounts so they could update it as well. As it stands, any changes they make would have to be emailed to me so I can make the public link current. I also NEVER know which computer is going to be available to print menus from at Stevenswood. The web interface of Dropbox solves this problem except that some of the computers don't have Word on them. I almost had this taken care of entirely with Google Docs, but I couldn't get everyone on board with Docs. At Mendocino Pacific Realty there are a few programs that just aren't great for us Mac folks (EVERYONE in the office uses a Mac). So we have great things like VMWare Fusion for sake of running a few simple programs like WinForms. Being lazy the way I am, I haven't bothered to get Windows to print so I have to export documents to PDF and had been emailing them to myself and checking my email in OSX to print from there. With Dropbox installed on both OSX and Windows I just put it in a folder and there it is on the other OS. I am also aware that VMWare Fusion has a shared folder, but this is far cooler... And so far I've only found one problem. The Dropbox program (versus the web interface) for both Mac and Windows doesn't require any sort of login. If you are on a public or semi public computer, installing Dropbox as a program is giving any user of that computer complete access to your Dropbox. All it needs is password protection. This issue is addressed in this forum post (link requires login): Hey everyone, As of right now, we do not have a password protection for Dropbox or any of your shared folders. However, this is something on our list of things to tackle. Another feature we have in the works is account-specific Dropbox folders, and this may also make some of your lives easier :) -Jon This whole issue is easily avoided by using the web interface, but it also seems like an easy fix and an obvious feature. Not a problem, but an understandable potential shortcoming is the 2GB limit for storage. If you're going to market this as a type of backup/storage we'll need a bit more than 2GB, gang :)
Last Updated ( Thursday, 03 July 2008 )

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