Mar
18

DropBox again

admin Internet, Web Technology, software Add your comment

The previous post elicited a comment from Andy at CloudBerry Lab:

I am a developer of another online backup product powered by Amazon S3 http://cloudberrydrive.com/ that we are going to release to beta soon. I would appreciate if you take a look and may be post a review on your blog.

Well I did take a look, but the CloudBerry product isn’t really what I’m looking for.  If all you want/need is a Windows-only client for accessing your S3 buckets directly and copying/moving content, then this product might well be just right.  But it doesn’t really compete with DropBox or JungleDisk.  Andy: if your product were closer to DropBox, and cross-platform, then I would have reviewed it.  As it is, I can’t pass judgement.

If you have time to plough through a very long blog thread, check out Jeremy Zawodny’s excellent piece on Amazon S3 tools. The discussion thread contains links to most (maybe all) the tools out there.

I’ve also been reading the DropBox forums. It’s good to see plenty of other people have requested features I miss (e.g. ability to configure DB to ignore certain file patterns).  There is an upcoming features wiki page which lists some things coming ‘soon’.  Nothing on using your own S3 space though.

Mar
16

JungleDisk and DropBox

admin Internet, Tools, Web Technology, software 1 comment

There are quite a few network-drive products out there competing for our attention these days.  I’ve tried quite a few (including Box.net and SkyDrive), but narrowed the choice down to the two which seem the best: JungleDisk and DropBox.

JungleDisk attracts me mostly because I can use my existing Amazon S3 storage behind the JungleDisk tool and pay only for the space I actually use. (Note, JD now also uses RackSpace CloudFiles, which actually looks even better than S3).  DropBox is free for 2GB, then a hefty 99 USD annually, for 50GB.  Round one to JungleDisk, in my view.

Then we come to the user-interface. Both tools integrate with Windows and Linux, JD using drive mapping to expose the storage and DropBox using a special folder inside My Documents, with icon overlays to indicate file status.  Both support drag/drop access and run a small tray-resident UI application.

But DropBox is just so, so much nicer to use than JD in the everyday Windows context.  It feels better integrated and the UI seems cleaner.  Other folk have blogged about this difference and I must concur – DropBox has the edge.

Now to the subject which prompted this post in the first place. Neither of these products appears to handle proxy servers particularly well, especially when switching between proxy / no-proxy.  If I restart Windows and forget to switch off the proxy in JD, here’s the mess I’m greeted with when Windows starts:

image 

Yuk. Can’t it simply notice that the proxy isn’t responding, log the fact / decorate the tray icon, and leave it for me to sort out?  It gets worse: if I click on the links (for more information) look what I get:

image

Is this really what they want the user to see?  This is awful.

DropBox is slightly better, but still doesn’t work properly if I leave the proxy on, and restart. No nasty dialogs, but the network connection isn’t resolved, even if I set it to ‘auto-detect proxy settings’ which according to the DropBox site should use the IE settings. Why can’t these tools auto-detect proxies properly?

DropBox files are cached on the local machine which means if the network is down I can still work on all my files locally, and re-sync when I next connect.  JungleDisk does cache your files, but in a pretty inaccessible way in your profile.  The path will be something like C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\JungleDisk\cache\e9998872111157539d8880eca4456345-default

Another good feature of DropBox which isn’t available in JungleDisk is sharing files and folders: in JD, everything is private.

DropBox gets so many things right. The one and only feature I want from JungleDisk is the S3 / CloudFiles backing store. Obviously, the DropBox business model is built around the 99 USD annual charge so I don’t know whether this can/will ever happen.

Sep
19

Ubiquity, and Contrasting Cultures

admin Internet, microsoft, software Add your comment
This is interesting: Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

Watch the video demonstration.  What a great idea, and I’m impressed by how well this appears to work even at the prototype stage. I’m going to install and try it.

But even if it turns out not to be so great an experience for me (demos always work perfectly, don’t they?), that’s not the point: what matters is that some bright people are doing interesting and worthwhile things and freely sharing the outcome with us, while Microsoft apparently spends its time (and some of its money mountain) on stuff like this.

Links to these two articles were close to each other (can’t recall where) and I was so struck by the contrast and what it reveals of the cultural differences that I felt compelled to write this.


Sep
07

Google Chrome, Part 2

admin Google, Internet Add your comment

Mmmm. It all looked so good in the cartoon. The reality isn’t quite there yet, but you can see where this is heading, and overall I’m optimistic. Here’s a summary:

  • Windows only at the moment. Understandable, given the market share stats, but what a pity I can’t run it on this LinuxMint laptop. Wondering what underlying runtime they’re using: surely one of the key features of Chrome is that it will become a client-side platform. They need to be able to run multiple processes (presumably native processes) to get one process per tab.
  • On Windows XP, I found Chrome simply ate CPU cycles. The memory (working set) story wasn’t as bad as I had expected (no worse than Firefox, anyway) but the CPU cost meant I was experiencing significant interruptions in other applications. I did experiment a bit, but so far I haven’t been able to characterise the circumstances under which I see this.
  • Loved the ability to drag a tab out of the frame to create a standalone ‘application’, e.g. Google Documents or GMail. That works very well.
  • Rendering speed seemed higher than Firefox.
  • Plugins for sound and video worked for me (e.g. BBC news) but I really didn’t set out to test this with different formats.
  • The lack of my Firefox add-ins took a little adjusting to! I’m sure this will eventually come.
  • The UI is quite bare, but you get used to it. The downloads bar (at the bottom of the screen) is actually rather good – better than FF.
  • The search/address bar (can’t recall what they call it) is excellent – I found it worked very well for me.
  • The fact that Chrome imports history etc. from FF if you want it to (I did) means it does very nearly allow you to pick up from where you left off in FF.

On the whole, very impressive. But I’m not ready to replace FF just yet.

Sep
02

Google Chrome

admin Google, Internet Add your comment
I must have missed the Chrome story, as I’ve only just seen a pointer to it from Darren Waters BBC blog piece. Having just read quickly through the Google Chrome storybook, this looks like a potentially important and exciting development. The storybook format is really excellent, too: what a contrast with the way other software companies (e.g. Microsoft) introduce a product!

Technically, this looks like a winner to me. Using a process instead of a thread per tab is a sound idea in principle, with lots of benefits (explained in the cartoon) which you pay for with a slightly higher initial resource footprint. I’ve little doubt that this will be a worthwhile price to pay, though: almost all of us have machines with enough CPU and memory to accept this.

It seems to me that the most important thing Google has done is to recognize that the nature of the browser has changed utterly, from what was simply a way to view HTML through to something which is trying to be a complete application platform. With Google Mail, Google Apps and Gears, plus a handful of add-ins, Firefox is currently central to the way I work, but because the underlying architecture is still anchored in the past, Firefox isn’t going to be stable or performant (or secure) enough to cut-it, for much longer.

This seems to be Chrome’s architectural starting point, and the team have sensibly decided to start with a clean sheet of paper, rather than simply build just another branded browser on top of old-world technology. In some ways, I wish the Mozilla engineers had gone down this route. Firefox has been a great success, but if Chrome is as good as the comic-strip suggests, I think Mozilla will need to raise their game significantly.