simplerich

Sometimes I have a lot of files I need to share. Great gobs of user generated content I want other people to be able to get at, but I don’t want to e-mail to them… or just that they may not need right this minute, but they may want to get at later. Things that they might not ever need, but that I use and think they’d benefit from seeing. E-mailing these things to them is sometimes not practical or the best choice. Handing them a memory stick or burned CD or DVD isn’t going to work if they’re a zillion miles away.

Once upon a time I was a huge advocate of box.net as my primary source of file sharing. I have entire books of work forms and reference over there that I’ve shared with myself and a couple other supervisors in the company. It was my favorite, most suggested file sharing service. I could share with specific people or nobody or even make things public for anybody to access via a URL that didn’t expose all my files to the public. It was great.

Their upload functionality isn’t always what it should be though. I tried to upload multiple files last night and it just wouldn’t upload at all. I was kvetching about the upload problem to another box.net early adopter and he said that’s why he decided to give Dropbox a try and maybe it’d help with what I was looking for. I was trying to use the drag and drop interface to upload to box.net and it was letting me drag and drop, but it wasn’t doing the important part of the upload interface… the uploading. So, I signed up with Dropbox, installed a desktop client, drag-and-dropped my way into converting to a Dropbox fan in seconds. Talk about easy!  Dropbox just displaced box.net as my favorite client because I can upload files to it without having to do it by hand, one at a time, while watching it. Drag files into the folder and go about my business. It uploads files in the background, and if I drag and drop the folders on the desktop client it does that on the online version. (I can’t find a way to organize files on the online client and that’s irritating, but I assume they’ll fix that in a later iteration for now I just organize them on my desktop version and it syncs it all up quickly and painlessly.)

So, if you need to share large files with someone consider Dropbox as a way to share little Johnny’s first steps on video or all those TPS reports you typed up. You won’t regret it.

In the interest of fairness I should mention some things about the new laptop that I’ve gotten used to since I first got it. First off the not being able to shut it at night has gotten OK with me. Turns out the open lid is just fine once I shut my eyes. Secondly.

The shutting the lid to sleep thing… it wakes up so darned fast I don’t care. In fact, I shut it all the time just because it’s so fast to wake-up I like the added security of it locking down when I shut the lid. So that annoying quirk is not so much annoying now as useful.

Lest you think I’ve gone all fanboi on you I have found more annoying quirks with the software. iWork’s iPage is just plain annoying. I wanted to copy/paste the Little Steps: 100 Great Tips For Saving Money… from The Simple Dollar (great blog by the way, and a fellow Iowan I hope to meet one day!) into iPages, edit it up to something more visually appealing and print it out to carry around with me (yes, I’ve got a flight tomorrow and wanted reading material… no, printing the web isn’t frugal. I get it. Leave me alone! 100 is just too long a list for me to read online. I wanted paper!) and for the LIFE of me I couldn’t get it to past into iPages without being in a little 2 inch by 2 inch text box in the middle of an empty page.

I think I wound up finding a way to get it into ipages, but it involved pasting it into Openoffice.org, saving that as a .doc and then opening it into iPages. That’s too ham-handed a way to do things in the future so I need some time to figure it out. Primarily because Openoffice.org’s software runs funny on a mac. I think it’s in a terminal or someting… beats me what X11 is but it keeps being there.

(Editorial Note added later) I use NeoOffice now. It’s a port of Openoffice.org’s software written natively for mac and it has no X11 window issue. NeoOffice is perfect implementation for the Mac.)

If you’re on the fence about a Macbook Pro (I recommend it over the mac for the light up keyboard, the extra ram, the better screen size and lighting, and the better feeling keys) and it won’t hurt you financially save up and get one. You won’t regret it. I’ve enjoyed mine every moment I’ve had it. I also STRONGLY recommend going to an apple store and letting one of their people talk to you about it and the software. They’re so very patient and informative. I wish I were nearer an apple store than I am right now. I’d be attending their free classes.