Tag: Dropbox »

3D Touch is a pretty cool concept for the iPhone 6s, even if it’s not quite fully realised yet.

While we’re still waiting for Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade to change everything when it comes to gaming, there’s a plethora of apps embracing the feature. Here are some of the best.

Dropbox, the popular file storage solution, has announced an update that adds three new features for you to enjoy.

An update has arrived for Dropbox's iOS app, with accessibility improvements being the main focus of this new version.

The update brings a new welcome tutorial, with clearer identification of its contents and VoiceOver support added. Photo titles are now properly announced, with thumbnails that are also more descriptive. Passcode lock can be enabled and disabled more easily, with the passcode field and digits now easier to select. Finally, a new button to close out the 'More Actions' menu has been added for VoiceOver, making it easier to get back to other areas of the app. Dropbox claims that this is just the beginning for accessibility improvements, with more set to arrive via more updates in the future.

Dropbox is available to download from the App Store now for free.

6 Wunderkinder's To-Do List and Task app, Wunderlist, now supports Dropbox.

To synch your Dropbox files to Wunderlist, just tap the paperclip icon in the Detail View, select Dropbox, and choose your file. With Wunderlist you can Assign, Comment, and prioritize your Dropbox files and they automatically update across all your systems.

You can pick up the newly-updated Wunderlist for free on the App Store.

Dropbox, one of the most popular mobile storage apps, has been updated to incorporate the new functions of iOS 8. Now users can find Dropbox file notifications in the today tab of Notification Center. This will make it easier to see your most recently modified files and open them with just a tap.

You will also be able to create and manage shared folders from the app. For added control, Dropbox for Business or Dropbox Pro users will also be able to manage permissions on those shared folders, making it easier to manage access to your files.

Also, the app can import and export your files to and from iOS apps that also support Apple’s new Storage Provider App Extensions. Now you can pull a document from your account and edit it with ease or share your vacation photos without all the hassle.

See all the new features in the Dropbox update for free on the App Store.

There's a new update out for everyone's favorite cloud storage app, Dropbox, and it's a useful one.

The app now allows you to reorder your Favorites list with a simple touch and hold motion. It's a small but significant step in making things that bit quicker for you. As well as that, you can now set up Dropbox with your camera, simplifying the set up process when linking a computer to the service. Plus, Dropbox now remembers your recent locations when importing files, which is bound to save some time!

Dropbox is available now on the App Store and it's a free download.

The problem with Carousel, the new app from Dropbox released today to organize, present, and share photos isn’t the app itself, it’s what it’s built on.

Carousel is a fantastic app for mobile presentation of photos. Quick and easy to find old photos and show and share them. It's really one of the better cloud photo apps I've tried. The real problem is that it’s build on Dropbox, which is a service created for cloud storage of documents and not for media. And that service is still priced for documents and not media.

Let me back up a second. Dropbox is an amazing service. I’ve used it and paid for it for years. But I’ve never considered it a great place to store photos, video, or other media files. The problem is that is is really expensive right now. In a time where Google is charging $10/month for a terabyte, and Flickr gives every user a free terabyte for images, Dropbox is charging 10x what Google is, and without upgrading to a business plan users can’t even get more then 500GB in an account (for $50/month).

Media piles up quickly. Especially so with photos since every reader of this blog likely has a camera with them at all times of the day, every day. I myself have well over 700GB of images that I’ve stored up from 10+ years of digital photography. I’ve just now started scanning old family photos and there are thousands of those waiting to be completed. All in all I’ll probably need close to a terabyte for just my images to store a “lifetime of memories.” And that doest even count the birthday, vacation, and all the other special occasion videos. This type of media is easier and easier to take and edit, but they will also fill up a Dropbox account very quickly.

So for now, Carousel is a great app, if you have a few hundred photos, but it doesn’t really fit the first selling point that Dropbox is touting it as, it doesn’t allow a lifetime of memories. That is unless you don’t have a lot of memories.

I think Dropbox will be forced into dropping their prices soon. Perhaps they are ready to do it now but didn't want to take the focus away from the new features. Cloud storage is a commodity, and Dropbox is way overpriced right now.

Looks like today has been a big day for Dropbox. Not only has the cloud storage service announced new features for Dropbox and Mailbox, but it's also revealed an all new photo gallery app called Carousel.

First off, 'Dropbox for Business' is now available for all users, and can be connected to their personal Dropbox in order to give them full access to all of their files whenever they need them. A new "auto-swipe" feature has also been added to Mailbox that will learn from your actions and start to perform them automatically - things like sorting emails into specific folders, muting conversations at certain times of the day, etc. It's basically Skynet, only instead of trying to wipe humankind off the face of the earth with an army of machines it helps to keep your inbox organized. Finally there's Carousel, a new photo gallery app that automatically organizes your photos, makes private sharing a breeze, and backs everything up so you won't have to worry about losing any precious memories.

You can find Carousel on the App Store for free.

A little over a year ago, everything changed. My daughter, Peregrine (Pip, for short), was born, and along with the myriad recalibrations, adjustments, and joyous changes that birth brought with it, I also finally came to terms with the true value of the iPhone camera: baby pictures! Hundreds and hundreds of them (no exaggeration) were taken by me, by friends, and by family, and then scattered over hard drives, social networks, and of course iPhones. The problem then became figuring out how to organize and store them privately and securely. As a devoted Mac user it’s easy enough to keep photos stored on iPhoto, but that’s a local option only, with limited cloud storage and sharing (those 1,000 photos on iCloud? Please!), and god forbid my hard drive crashes without proper backup.

I thought all of my problems with cloud storage for photos were solved when Everpix came along. Here was a fantastic, well-designed app that also had great web-based software and a Mac-based uploader. Best of all, it could load in all of my photos from various social streams, eliminate or hide duplicates, and handle a potentially unlimited number of photos for a reasonable monthly or yearly price.

There was just one big problem though; Everpix went out of business.

Before I get to the heart of this article, there are a few lessons to learn from my Everpix experience.

One: Always keep all of your photos on a local hard drive.

Two: Backup said hard drive as often as humanly possible (something I still don’t do, so do as I say, not as I do).

Three: Never, ever assume that a site, app, or service will exist forever. It won’t; it just won’t. They will all go away at some point. Some will last five years. Some will last a year or two. Some of the very best won’t even make it that long.

So I found myself back at square one, trying to find another good (read, as close to the effortless Everpix as I could get) cloud-based storage solution for my photos. Read on for my look at nine different cloud storage services that work with iOS.

The NeatConnect is a huge evolutionary jump for Neat. It adds many awesome features and scanning options to their current scanner line and even cuts the cords. Perfect for iPad and iPhone use as it doesn't require the use of any desktop software. The NeatConnect can send documents directly to cloud services which can then be used from iOS apps. It's quick, easy to use, and honestly pretty cool.

The NeatConnect can be set up from the iPhone shaped screen on the front of the device. User credentials can be input directly into the device for the services used. In addition, document can be scanned and immediately emailed from the device by putting in a email address as the destination.

I'm really impressed with the NeatConnect, even at it's $499 price. Neat has done a great job of delivering the options people want (and need) these days. The cloud options cover just about everything anyone could want. And no subscription fees make this a truly honest product. A great buy and will be available this October.

Take a look at the overview video below for a great intro to the NeatConnect scanner.

Powerslyde users suggest apps to other users, and we pull from that list to share the latest trends. Yep. That's how this whole shebang works, so let's get to it.

This week, there are some useful (some even classic) apps in the mix:

Waze
SloPro
oovoo
Slacker Radio
Dropbox

Dropbox is certainly a no-brainer, since anyone with even a free account can access files on the go. Waze, while recently purchased by Google, is the best crowd-sourced GPS and mapping app out there. And, while not as popular or well-known as Pandora, customizable radio app Slacker Radio is still delivering great stuff to many users. Then there are two lesser-known apps: SloPro is a slow-motion camera app and ooVoo is, for lack of an easier explanation, a Skype competitor. Are these better than other apps out there? Hard to tell, so if you give them a try let us know!

Again, our thanks to Powerslyde for keeping track of all of these recommendations. What apps do you recommend? Drop us a comment below, or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. See you next week!

Over one million apps have made their way onto the App Store during its five years of existence. A million. That's a pretty miraculous number when you think about it. However it's not the amount of apps we have to pick from that I find so fascinating, but rather just how much things have changed since 2008. Pickings were comparatively slim at first, and many developers were just starting to dip a toe in the waters of Apple's new smartphone.

On top of that, the technology itself has changed tremendously in a relatively small amount of time. It makes me wonder if anyone from 2008 would even recognize current iOS devices, and by extension the App Store. Would a newer Apple initiate have any idea what they were looking at if they somehow managed to take a trip to five years ago? I think it warrants a look at how the hardware, the App Store, and the apps contained within it have evolved.

2008 - The Beginning of the Beginning

The App Store's first year was a rough but promising one. The iPhone 3G rolled out to coincide with Apple’s new software venue and the original iPhone was still viable. The iPod touch was also present and accounted for, while the second generation appeared closer to the end of the year. Even at this point many developers were eager to push these early iOS devices to their limits, to make them more than just a phone or an .mp3 player with a fancy screen.

Handy apps like Pandora Radio, Last.FM, Facebook, and Yelp were to be expected, but that didn't make them any less impressive to have on a handheld platform. Others such as the intuitive personal organizer Evernote, the eerily accurate song-identifying app Shazam, eWallet’s convenient and secure account password management, and MLB At Bat with its extensive baseball coverage further capitalized on the particulars of the hardware and its general portability. Of course there were also some pretty unnecessary options out there, too. Flashlight kind of served a purpose but was also fairly pointless. It wasn't as bad as stuff like More Cowbell!, though.

At the same time, the games available on the App Store were beginning to show people that "mobile" didn't have to equal "mediocre." Sure there were a few simple ports of the odd classic such as Ms. PAC-MAN, Vay, and Scrabble, but there were also some impressive iOS renditions of popular console games like Super Monkey Ball coming out. Potential mobile gamers also had a few really special titles such as Galcon and Fieldrunners to tide them over. When all was said and done there were over 7,500 apps on the App Store by the end of the year, with more being added every day.

2009 - Moving Right Along

The following year saw even more impressive releases as Apple's digital marketplace began to expand. The second generation of iPod Touch was the bright and shiny new toy at the time, but it was followed shortly by the iPhone 3GS in June while the latest and greatest third generation Touch closed out the year in September. It all meant better processors, better CPUs, more advanced operating systems, and so on. All stuff that developers needed to acclimate to, but also stuff that meant they could push their boundaries even further. There was no loss of steam when it came to content, either: the App Store finished off 2009 with well over 100,000 apps available.

Many of the basic smartphone necessities were covered, but there was room for so much more. Especially while the technology was improving. Plenty of people used their iPhones as phones, sure, but with the addition of Skype they were able to enjoy the added functionality of instant messaging and voice chat without cutting into their data plans (so long as a wifi connection was present). Big companies were really starting to take notice as well. That same year Starbucks and many other big businesses threw their virtual hats into the ring with their own apps designed to make life a little bit easier for their iOS-using customers. Practicality was also becoming an even bigger focus. The Kindle app gave iOS users a practical e-reading option, and Dropbox was there being Dropbox. By which I mean "an awesome and super-convenient way to transfer files between multiple platforms." And this same level of refinement could be seen creeping into the games as well.

So many of the App Store's most notable games and franchises came out around this time. It was almost a mobile rennaisence of a sort. This was the year Real Racing first blew mobile gamers' minds, even causing some of them to question the legitimacy of in-game video footage until they were able to see the finished product for themselves. Zenonia was just a fledgling action RPG at the time, and while a lot of people liked it I doubt they knew just how many sequels it would spawn. The same goes for Pocket God, although with updates rather than multiple releases. Flight Control began to eat away at peoples' free time, Angry Birds and Doodle Jump hit it big (like, super big), and Myst and The Sims 3 further displayed the potential for major releases on mobile platforms. Oh, and Canabalt almost single-handedly invented and popularized a genre.