On Friday, I downloaded Dropbox. I have heard many Web designers talking about it and Mark Sutherlin had also mentioned it.
What is Dropbox? It is a folder that sits on your computer that allows you to share files with other people. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
You can share up to 2GB with a free account. You can get up to 50GB of space for $9.99/month or $99/year.
The big news at the keynote was Apple’s upgrades to iLife (now 09′) and iWork (now 09′). Plus they introduced iwork.com, which is a site where you can collaborate on documents. I think they are a little behind Google with this service, but their process for sharing and collaborating over documents is Apple slick. However, the biggest news that will interest some of us is the upgrade to the 17″ MacBook. It has a new battery (will last 8 hours!), a new screen, and of course it now is made like the other MacBooks from a single slab of aluminum. There are additional goodies, but I will let Apple tell you what those are if you care over at apple.com.
Some other enhancement to iTunes and other things were mentioned, but again I will let Apple share those. There were no major headlines that effect our work (no mention of Snow Leopard), so the keynote was a little ho hum.
Collaborate on a website or other graphic with Twiddla. Twiddla is a free tool that allows you to meet with others and text chat (or even audio conference) while drawing on a website, image or other type of document (pdf, doc, etc). It is free and requires no signup or login and no download or plugins. The service is browser agnostic and requires no special setup.
Just go to Twiddla, click GO and click Invite (or simply share the URL of the Twiddla page with anyone you want to join). It’s really easy.
I’ve found that filedropper is useful, as it allows the transfer of files up to 5GB in size.
From the guys at Common Craft. They have made several videos like this including RSS, Wikis, and Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, etc.).
Tina Hood introduced me to Twittering. She showed me how Women of Faith team members message throughout the day and it impressed me that this very dispersed group maintains cohesive connections through these 160 character mini blogs. I think I have read that someone coined the term that twittering is micro blogging. That is a pretty good term.
Tina and I talked about twittering at length and wondered if we might use this on our team to draw us in a bit more especially during the summer period when many of us are away on assignments, working on mpd, vacations, etc. We have talked it up some on our team, and several of us have tried it on for size. It does seem to deliver a more connected experience.
Join us on this experiment. Set up an account on Twitter.com, and then see what team members you can find and “follow” us.
(hint Tina, Anna, Jeff, Greg, Mark and me are some that are already on Twitter)
P.S. It seems like a field team would really benefit from this kind of connection as they move through their days and weeks.
UPDATE: (08/13/08) We now have a team Twitter account. You can follow us at wearethelab.
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