Island in the Net by Khürt Williams
Technology and Photography Musings. Established circa 2000.
I'm giving myself 30 days to completely remove Google from my life. Completely. No Gmail. No Docs. No Google Play. No Android. No ChromeOS. And, perhaps most terrifying, no Google Voice or Hangouts.
Then, once that transition is complete, I am challenging myself to stick to it for at least 30 additional days after that point.Bryan Lunduke
Follow along on Bryan's journey.
Published via MarsEdit
When Apple released MobileMe as a replacement for .Mac I decided it was time to give it a try. Mind you, I already have a free Gmail account with 8GB (and growing), and a free Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Contact. I had already configured Leopard’s Mail, iCal and Address Book for use with these services and for just $20/year Google sold me 10GB of space on Picasweb to store and share my photos with friends and family. All these services were well integrated enough though the web interfaces were rudimentary, lacking pizzazz, and the Picasa software was not available for the Mac.
I decided that $99 was not too much to pay to try MobileMe for one year.
During MacWorld 2009 Google finally released a Picasa for the Mac (it’s beta of course) and it has a lot of features (facial recognition and geo-location) to be found in the iPhoto ’09. Recently there have been rumors that Google is preparing to offer an online storage service called G-Drive similar to iDisk. That got me thinking about the Dropbox service that I have been using for a few months that provides similar features to iDisk.
Dropbox is a service that synchronizes a specific folder and its contents to an online account and across multiple computers - Mac, Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) or Windows. That is one definite advantage over iDisk which is available only on a Mac. Although iDisk does work on Windows, Apple doesn't want you to use it at work. Unless it's two guys working in a garage, most companies today have some sort of Web proxy server. A Web proxy server is a server that acts as a go-between for requests from computer seeking resources from Internet web servers. MobileMe does not have any support for proxy servers on Windows so forget about using it at work. How hard would it be for Apple to program in the use of the Windows default?
After downloading and installing the Dropbox client software, you will have a folder called “Dropbox” on a user selected location on your computer. I put the folder on the desktop on both Windows and Mac. From there I can open it and use it just like any other Windows or OS X folder. In the background, the installed Dropbox client is synchronizing any changes to the “cloud” and across any computer logged in with the same account. A free account provides 2GB of online storage and you upgrade to 50GB for $99/year or $9.99 per month.
Any file you delete from the Dropbox folder is deleted across all computers. However, Dropbox keeps a version history, so you can undelete or restore the Dropbox to a previous state quite easily using the very well laid out web interface. You can rollback to a version of a file from just a few hours ago to a few weeks ago.
Just like iDisk, Dropbox allows you to share your files (photos, documents, music etc) and folder with whomever you chose; and they don’t have to be Dropbox users to do so. Just add the files you want to share and your friends and colleagues can access them from any web browser (and I do mean ANY). iDisk thumbs its nose at Internet Explorer users. Not useful for sharing with my Windows XP family.
I have been using Dropbox for about three months and the only complaint I have is that the 2GB free account might not be big enough for users who need to share larger files. I could upgrade to the $99 option but that is a lot to pay for 50GB of storage when 500GB hard drives now go for as little as $99. Google offers 10GB of online photo store for $20/year and I expect that the rumored G-Drive will offer something reasonably priced.
The free version of Dropbox does not provide as much storage space as iDisk and can be pricey compared to other online storage solutions (take a look at Mozy.com Unlimited). However if 2GB is enough for you, and you need to share files with Windows and Mac users and you want the ability to restore files, then goto http://www.getdropbox.com and download the client now.
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing email messages. In effect IMAP allows the user to view email using popular mail software ( such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail ) without downloading (and deleting) the messages from the mail server. Unlike the more widely used post office protocol (POP), IMAP messages remain on the mail server and can be accessed from multiple machines.I am not sure when IMAP access was turned on when I logged into my main Gmail account to change the POP setting I noticed that the screen was different. Google normally has some king of "New features" thing in the upper right hand corner of the page. They do this for Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well. There was nothing on the main page to indicate something was new.
In my Gmail account IMAP was enabled by default. The Gmail team has provided configuration instructions for the most popular mail clients. I use OS-X Mail.app to read my Gmail ( I use the browser elsewhere ). Under POP I had to suffer with my mail being archived whenever it was downloaded. With IMAP I will be able to keep my Mail.app view and web view synchronized. That means if I read or delete a message in Mail.app it shows up as read or delete in Gmail.
One thing I did notice is that my list of labels appeared as IMAP folders in Mail.app and the list of IMAP folders including the Spam bucket. I think this is a great idea and is what the user community would expect. I think Google has once again upped the ante when it comes to email.
