The Puerto Rican Rails Dude

I’m pretty damn excited by the long-awaited public launch of Dropbox, an online file storage service. Well, it’s more than that. It’s a service that allows you to store, share and synchronize your files, either on the web, or as a ‘dropbox’ folder on your computer. They offer a nice chunk of space - 2 Gigabytes, which to me is more than enough for the things I would usually store in these services.

It might sound like just another online file storage site, but it really is not. It’s ridiculously easy to use. Once you install their client software and create an account with them, your computer will have a special folder, where you can just drop files in and they will automatically be synced on your account. No need to do any manual syncing or waiting for a timed sync to occur. It’ll happen totally transparent from your regular workflow. Provided you have a fast Internet connection, the synchronization process is virtually instantaneous. Then you can either grab the files from a web interface, or by installing and configuring the client in another computer. It’s that damn easy. Take a look at the tour they have on their site.

I must admit, I was a bit skeptical about this service after I read about it in TechCrunch earlier this year. I thought it wouldn’t be anything special compared to any other site that provides similar services. However, after reading more and more about it, the curiosity got the best of me. I scrounged for an invite and eventually got one. I signed up, but to be honest I never used it much. I only have access to Mac and Linux computers at the moment, and Dropbox was Windows and Mac only, so I was rather limited as to where I could use it.

However, the excitement arrived yesterday, when not only I read that Dropbox launched publicly, but they also released a Linux version of their client software! I immediately downloaded the client at work (laptop using Ubuntu 8.04), created my account. and it worked just as it did on the Mac. I started transferring files and got them when I arrived home. Everything went without a hitch. I’m now finding more and more uses for Dropbox, particularly work-related files that I can access at home.

Kudos to the entire Dropbox team for putting out some quality work.

At my recommendation, my company started using Campfire by the awesome guys at 37signals. In case you don’t know what Campfire is yet, it’s a site where groups of people can chat, upload files, share code and many other collaborative activities. I recommended Campfire because I think this is just what our company needed during this time where we have testers who are in other cities. It’s my first time using Campfire in a business environment, and hopefully it all works out well.

One of the things that initially worried me about Campfire is that being a web-based app, it would be difficult to know when there was any activity on the site. The good thing is that Campfire has an audio alert, a pleasant beep, that alerts me whenever someone wrote something in the chat rooms I’m at, along with changing the title of the page so that I can spot it in my open tabs. However, I’m guessing that I’m not the only web developer who has a myriad of tabs open at any given moment. Site testing, analytics, API specs, build/test results Google - All of them usually occupy a space in my browser. Adding Campfire would mean that it would get lost in a sea of tabulated titles.

After seeing this could be a problem, I immediately thought of Fluid, which I had used previously. Fluid is a browser of sorts. However, instead of being just another browser, Fluid allows you to create an app that’s site-specific, so your web-based apps will act like an independent desktop application, separate from whatever you have in your browser. It’s perfect for those sites which you constantly have open, such as web-based E-Mail like Gmail, social networking sites like Facebook, and, as in my new-found case, chats like Campfire. It will also alert you whenever there’s a change in the site you’re visiting, right on the application icon in the dock. So, as an example, if you’re using Gmail, you’ll see new mail notifications in the dock, instead of needing to open the app window. It’s pretty neat and convenient.

I was happy that I found a solution. One ceveat, though: Fluid is a Mac-only app, and I use Linux at work (at least until the bosses buy souped-up Macbook Pros for their developers… I can dream, can’t I?). So I was bummed out again. Then I remembered that Mozilla was developing an app with a similar concept, called Prism. The functionality is virtually the same: You set up a site to be run as a desktop app, making it totally independent from your regular browser.

Seeing that Prism is in the Mozilla Labs, I didn’t expect much of it. However, it works great on my Linux laptop under Ubuntu 8.04. I was able to create a Campfire app and add it to the desktop with ease. It never crashed on me or gave me any problems during the entire afternoon I was using it. Granted, there wasn’t much activity going on in the chat rooms at the time, but everything worked as if I were working on Firefox.

The main difference between Prism and Fluid is the fact that Mozilla is making Prism available not only for Mac, but for Windows and Linux as well. Of course, Fluid is written with Mac in mind, and it has all sort of goodies for the Mac (like the aforementioned updates in the icon, Growl notifications, its own JavaScript API and more), so you’re much better off with Fluid if you’re on the Mac. For the rest, then Prism seems like a mighty fine solution in the meantime.

With more and more web-based apps taking up the majority of our time in front of a computer, I think these applications will be more widely used in the near future. You can already see some sites adopting it, even including icons for your usage of the desktop, like GitHub and 37signals. There’s even a Flickr group adding more and more site icons every day. If you haven’t checked out either of these apps, you should check them out now.