Why I recommend Dropbox to my Family and Friends

November 26th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Last night the unexpected happened. My laptop hard drive died. 500GB of hard disk space is a lot, and I was using a few hundred GB of it, but outside of applications, the data was not a whole lot, about 6GB. All of my music is backed up to several local machines, and my photos are on my photo machine, home server and Amazon. The amazing thing about the total hard drive failure was that the only single thing I was thinking about was “what size/kind of hard drive will I replace it with?” I never once thought about loss of data.

That’s quite an amazing change from where we were not to long ago. I have lost so many photos, videos and MP3 files that I would gladly pay to get back over the years because of an admittedly lazy backup strategy (or in some cases no strategy.)

I can remember a hard drive failure resulting in a tangible sense of loss. Now it’s no different to me than a failed video card or a busted printer. Finally, and I hate to use the word, the Cloud and more specifically Dropbox, has solved my data problems and my computer is just a very fancy tool.

So let’s go through the process of rebuilding my computer and I’ll throw in all the places Dropbox made a huge difference in my restoration strategy.

The Data

Of course I want all of my documents, photos, Lightroom presets, fonts, PDFs, etc. Those are super important, just by installing Dropbox all of that was right back where it belonged, perfectly in sync with my PC Desktop, Mac Pros, iMac, Work Laptop, even my iPad and iPhone. If I end up on someone else’s PC I can access all of it from the browser. I always have access to all of my data.

I even store tons of sensitive personal data on Dropbox. I am sure you’ll cringe at believing it, but Dropbox’s service is actually very secure.

The Software

After I had reinstalled OS X, the first thing I did was reinstall the Dropbox client. It had about 6GB of downloading to do before it was finished, but at that point I was ready to start installing real software. Why do I say that? Because I store all of my software serial numbers in Dropbox. I have a folder where I keep the serial numbers for Adobe’s Creative Suite, Lightroom, Final Cut, Office..you name it. During this install I had to reach for X DVDs in total: OS X, iLife, Adobe Creative Suite, Final Cut Express. That’s literally it.

Lightroom, Office… pretty much all of my other apps were download from the net and punch in my serial number.

The Habits

It doesn’t take that long to get used to it. I don’t even think twice about it anymore. Unless it’s a massive video file or a disc image of some sort, I always save it to Dropbox. I have a very Monkish hierarchy where I know exactly where things should go. I have shares with several of my friends and my wife and son. We never email files or IM File transfer them anymore. When Dawn needs something I’ll just say “I stuck it in the family Dropbox.” Not only does she know where that is, she usually gets a tidy system tray notification that it has been added and she can click it and go right to it. If I need to share it with someone else I’ll just throw it in the public folder and get a link right to it.

While we are on that topic of convenience, several times my OCD file maintenance habits have led me to delete a file prematurely. That’s not much of a problem either, within 30 days I can just go back to the Dropbox website and undelete it. If you want to pay a little extra you can get unlimited history for undeleting and file versioning.

The Cost

While we are on the topic, how much does Dropbox cost? For most people it’s free. If you need less than 3+GB, it’s free. I say 3+ because Dropbox is pretty generous at giving you extra space, we are talking 1.5GB of space, for doing your part to help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, friends, etc.

If you need more, like me, $9.99/month gets you 50GB of space, $19.99/mo gets you 100GB of space. That’s pretty reasonable considering the amount of space and the features you get for the money.

The Dropbox Commercial

So why am I sitting here telling you how awesome Dropbox is? I have been saying it for ages, but mostly because it just made a dead hard drive a minor inconvenience. It gives me the utmost confidence in data redundancy, and lastly, it’s just cool. The service is rock solid, I can’t remember an outage at all. It works on every device you have pretty much. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it makes keeping up with your data everywhere you need it totally painless.

There are other services that provide similar functionality, and I have tried them all. I’ll stick with Dropbox, I love it.

If you are going to try it, sign up with this Dropbox link and I get 500mb of free space, you’ll get a nice 250mb bump for yourself too!

In-Laws, Gadgets and Holidays

November 25th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I have noticed something. Anytime we have family in to visit, the gadgets come out and everything gets a good playing with. This Thanksgiving there are two huge hits, the iPad and Xbox 360 Kinect.

There have been at least 5 people stationed in the family room on the Kinect since we finished eating. It’s been mostly Kinect Sports, that’s obviously the hit. I feel quite amped about it tho, being a Microsoft boy, it’s pretty exciting to see something that popular with good ole’ consumers. If you read the blogs lately you would get the impression that we just don’t get consumers anymore at all.

The other bigtime gadget, although thankfully in second place, is the iPad. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Tumble Drop, Scrabble… the games are huge.

Ironically the response for Kinect was overwhelmingly “I am buying one of these as soon as I get home.” The iPad response was quite different, it was “it’s pretty cool, but I wouldn’t spend $500 on one.”

Wonder what this Christmas will bring, I am looking forward to some awesome sales of Kinect, Xbox 360, Windows Phone 7 and hopefully some Windows 7 Tablets.

Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving!


Software–The Missing Manual

November 23rd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I remember back in the day, you used to get a huge manual with any software you bought. When I got C++ 7.0 (which shipped on 27 floppies by the way) it came with about 30lbs of manuals. Windows, Photoshop, Autocad…they all came with tomes to tell you how to use them.

ibmpcmanuals

These days nothing comes with a manual. When I purchased Logic Studio a few years ago I was shocked it came with a 10” stack of manuals. Heck, these days you are lucky to get a disc, now it’s just download and use a key much of the time.

Where’s My Damned Book?

I say that in gest. The point of this article is not to blast cheap software manufacturers who don’t give us paper anymore (they do usually put something resembling a manual online) but to applaud the rise of software development principles that are entering the golden age of software that doesn’t need manuals.

Keep in mind that in the early days computers were alien. Part of the manual was to take a person who was uncomfortable and unknowledgeable about these systems, and teach them how to do something useful with it.

Once Windows 95 had cemented the Window Managed operating system with it’s explosive growth, users had total command of clicking, double clicking, dragging, dropping, etc. No longer did technical writers have to assume that users had no idea what context menus were or how to use settings or preferences panes. Software engineers stopped being code monkeys and branched into teams that specialized in different parts of the process, and from this came the all mighty User Experience designer. There are about 30 different things they call themselves these days, but the main goal of the UX guy is to take the tasks that the user needs to accomplish with the software, and make them simply make sense.

Now that users had a solid grasp of the fundamentals, the whole way software was designed changed. Instead of designing the software in a way that made sense to computer nerds, we started asking questions like “What would the user expect?” and trying to make parallels to real world experiences so the software feels more natural.

Touch Me Baby

jazzmutant_lemur1The iPhone took this to a whole new level. In many ways the iPhone has kind of reset how we look at software in general. I know in my professional career we are looking at everything through new eyes. All across the world, and much for the first time, software companies are thinking “what would we do if we just started over?”

Keeping up with legacy software and customers can be a real tax on innovation, and touch technology has given many software companies the first solid excuse to just wipe the slate clean and start over.

With touch input, software has taken yet another step forward in feeling natural. Software designers are having to think past common paradigms like double-click and drag and drop, to come up with new ways to accomplish tasks in ways that just make sense.

A Glimpse into the Future

Part of this scares me a little bit. As a self-proclaimed “Power User” I am somewhat unnerved by devices like the iPad, and I do have one. Right at this moment I am using Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Messenger, Zune, Internet Explorer, Tweet Deck, Windows Live Mail (Can you tell I work at Microsoft yet?) and Photoshop. I can see all of them right now. I don’t have to hide one of them to switch to another. If the iPhone and iPad can manage to murder double-click, drag & drop and context menus, can they kill Window Management? Will people get used to not having it and it just go away? I can’t imagine how that could ever do for people who really do work with computers, but for consumers, who knows? If so, is that a bad thing?

Right now I feel totally claustrophobic on an iPad, why can I only see one thing? Why can’t I USE more than one application at once. It’s not that unheard of. One big company takes a bet on removing a technology, and before long it’s just dead. Usually there is a forcing function behind the scenes like USB-Keys effectively killing CD/DVDRW, but sometimes technology gets made more accessible and the mass market is more appealing than the niche market so features just start to go away, reverse feature creep.

Where Am I Going With This?

Nowhere maybe, I am not sure. I love how our industry has evolved from an awkward relationship between user and machine to machines becoming a natural extension of users. I look around these days and marvel at the technology that is at my fingertips every waking moment of the day, and I am beyond excited about the future. In my experience the industry is cyclical. We have started down an app centric road, which lends itself incredibly well to the current task-based design principles. The idea of getting a user in and out of an experience quickly and painlessly is fundamentally sound. The problem is that not every problem can be distilled down to a 30 second start-to-finish experience. I write Business Intelligence software. Problems are complex and the software must always manage a certain amount of complexity. I don’t think that a business Analyst wants to be popping in and out of a dozen apps to do his or her job.

I guess that’s the part I am trying to solve in my head. In an app centric platform like iPad, the home button experience is jolting. You feel like you have just abandoned your work. I am sure after awhile that feeling will change, but there is an engineering problem there to solve I think. Let’s start the discussion there shall we. If you were building a new User Interface, to manage multiple running applications, and you couldn’t use Window Management, but you didn’t want to do the full screen only experience either, what would you expect? What natural experience could you relate to it?

Imagine if you are cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Each dish that you are working on is an app. The app is what helps you make the dish, but you are making a half dozen dishes at once. You have to manage some shared resources like your oven, stovetop or microwave. How do you manage these multiple tasks in real life? Unless you are Monk, you aren’t wiping the counters down, putting everything away and starting over with each dish. How would you extend the analogy to software? You need your apps running, you need to be able to see changes to apps in the background and react to events.

The alert system doesn’t manage this effectively. Apps need to be able to communicate with you and each other. Join the discussion in the comments, I am very curious for feedback.

Search Engines Never Forget

November 21st, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

I decided to start putting more time into my blog again. I updated my theme to something more pleasing for readers, I started working on new content, and then I decided to take a look at where I stand on traffic. It’s amazing to me that I had gone two months without writing something. I assumed I was left for dead, yet here I am with nearly 300 average visitors per day, 11,000+ page views in the last 30 days.

image

It was a lot of working building my blog up in the beginnings. It’s a testament to the work that you put in that after you get the love from the search engines, they don’t really forget you. Sure my statistics are terrible. 93.45% new visitors? That’s all search engine traffic. 25 seconds per average visit? That means they are finding the content, reading and leaving. Looks like I need to invest in some more relevant content. 89% bounce rate? Obviously I don’t present interesting content in a way compelling enough to get them to click through.

So I’ll start with adding some great new content. I’ll work on my layout a little bit to make sure that my best foot is forward so to speak. Then I’ll get back into a building mode. This blog used to get over 30,000 unique visitors a month. I can get back there, I just have to put in the work.

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