Dropbox, built in The Sync API lets your app work with Dropbox as if it were a local filesystem on the device. We take care of syncing and caching for you so you can work on delivering the best apps and a seamless experience to your users across different devices and platforms.
It's basically an iCloud-engine for Dropbox enabled apps. Looking forward to the implementation of this in my favourite apps.
Last night we had diner at my parents house, and during coffee and dessert the conversation turned to high school, and how people have changed since those days.
I for one had long hair, was always dressed in black and most students considered me a geek. These days, being a geek is socially accepted, my blacks have turned into colors, and the long hair is long gone.
My girlfriend had never seen any photos of me of those days so I quickly grabbed my iPad so show her some pictures. It’s only today that I realized the significance.
A few months ago I had made the switch from Aperture to Dropbox as my main photo storage. More out of frustration with Aperture, than for my love of Dropbox. But as it turned out, it was a good decision because I now had an archive of my entire live’s worth of photos in the palm of my hand.
People don’t want to be tied to one app for a certain file type, stuck in these app silos where the data only exists within one app. This feels like a dictator telling us how we can use our devices and it understandably rubs advanced users the wrong way. Moreover the huge fear is that if we go the way of obscuring the file system, like it is in iOS, advanced users will be stuck in a world where we lack control over our own creations. — Brooks Review
Apple has PhotoStream as a way to have your last thousand photos readily available on any device. But nowhere to see your older stuff. And with iCloud, more so than Dropbox, files sync between devices without a moments thought. I can start this text as a single sentence on my iPhone, write the article on my iPad and do a final spell check on my Mac before posting it online. But what if I need a draft that's stored on my Mac?
Ben Brooks describes iCloud as app silos, which locks content to a specific app and which hides the file system to users. He proposed open in or move to as a way to solve those file-limitations.
But even so, iCloud lacks. With Dropbox I have all my files available when I need them, but out of sight when I don’t, so I can focus on the ones I’m currently working with.
With iCloud I have all my files here and now in one app, but nowhere to put them when I’m done.
What Dropbox offers, and iCloud doesn’t is an archive. Dropbox is a place to make your content available everywhere, anytime at a moments notice, but only when you need it. iCloud only has storage as an option. Files are in your app, or you delete them, they can’t float just behind the horizon for future use.
This brings me to my current balance:
If Apple solves the archive, is has a complete iCloud.
I wrote a follow-up post with more thoughts on this archiving the cloud idea
“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Well, public places like those I left are not the thoroughly evil force of Sauron’s One Ring, but just not my cup of tea. I want to get more focus and herewith I get to that goal.
Does our tendency to join new platforms as they arrive makes us less focused? That's the question @Ur asks himself in this blogpost on his new website.
In an effort to get a more focussed and less openly exposed online presence, he quit most of the social platforms and decided to focus on three instead:
This stands opposite to what I think, that the multitude of platforms isn't a problem, but the duplication of content through cross posting is. It's not butter scraped over too much bread, but just the amount of bread we produce that's the problem. Quitting platforms and especially similar ones is a way to reduce the noise, but some of them have their merits. If we want to post images online, one could argue we seek an audience, otherwise, why post images. Is a blog then the best way to show these candid shot, or is it a platform like. Flickr, or 500px?
Crafting an online presence is about clarity, a clutter less experience that focusses on what you want to share, and the platform is a way, not an endpoint to that.
So Ur's post has made me think... Do I carry too much accounts with me? Can I shed an account or two? And should I?
The combination of cloud-based backup and Apple-centric usage means that even if everything I own is stolen or dropped in the sea, I can head to the nearest major city, find an Apple Store and replace whatever I need to replace, then restore my files from the cloud and still make my afternoon deadline.
Mike Elgan writes about working as a blogger on the road.
What happened between the movies and TVs of the older era (mid-80s and older) and those of the newer era? The shift was profound yet entirely subtle, something that a lot of people wouldn’t have really noticed at all – we shifted from portraying computer hardware to portraying computer software.
Interesting article onsane.info on the evolution of computers in visual media.
