DropBox - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy

For those of you who weren’t searching for a www.GetDropBox.com solution, it’s because you weren’t aware something this cool exists…

It’s a file sharing solution, that resembles a backup system or for the programmer world, a versioning system like Subversion or CVS.

For some time now, getDropBox.com was in closed beta, but now that’s over and anyone can join in and start using it.

Here are the main benefits of using DropBox:

• 2GB free storage
• Synchronization of files between many computers (including Macs :D); the system works as a background process and notifies you when new files were added, changed or deleted; do you use FTP to share files between home & work? This is better !
• File versioning (you will be able to see more versions of the same file); great for documents and source code; did you ever change something in a document and forgot what it was?You can recover from these kinds of mistakes;
• Collaboration (you can share the same account login with one or more persons and keep your files updated)
• Ability to generate a web link of any file and send it to someone on the web; did you ever have problems with sending files to friends from IM (instant messaging) clients?
• The possiblity of accesing your files remotely from a web-browser

If you don’t believe me, at least give it a shot ! It’s fast to install, easy to configure and a pleasure to use:

www.getdropbox.com/ and download the client for Windows or Mac

or

www.getdropbox.com/login to create a new account and enter the promotional code "lunch" that enters you in a prize draw of free premium accounts after the service leaves beta.

There are 2 other services I know of that can do similar things, but DropBox is better at file sharing. I’m talking about Microsoft’s FolderShare which is slower in updating files (and you’ll feel it in your OS) and Apple’s MobileMe which is a premium service of around $70/year, doesn’t have versioning but has other features like contact sharing.

If you’ll use it, share your experience with DropBox or similar services that you know of through comments !

A little user-agent history for you

I came upon this post www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/ and I laughed…

They present the chaos of user-agent strings in a quick and funny way.

Be sure to read it if you have the time.

Also I want to add the following statements.

There are a lot of user agents out there and I’m not talking only about the browsers.

There are different versions of useragent for each browser, version of a browser, certain plugins installed in a browser and so on.

Some good folks wrote plugins like User Agent switcher which allows you to fake your user agent from within firefox.

I find one particular site interesting, user-agents.org which lists all known user agents, by the way the Search Engines also have their own Google for example having around 7 of them.

By the way, did you know that Mozilla stands for Mosaic Killer ? I am shocked that all this time that I’ve been using Mozilla based browser I didn’t know this.