Sync and share files via Dropbox

Dropbox!

I skimmed through my RSS feeds yesterday and saw news about Dropbox and my boyfriend also showed it to me so I thought why not give it a try? After all, it’s a convenient app for people who work on multiple computers and still want to make sure that their files are intact and it also has that capability of sharing so that’s another good thing.

So here are the lovely things about Dropbox:

1. You could sync files on various machines via your Dropbox directory.
2. If you put files in your Public directory, other users of Dropbox can see them.
3. You can associate various machines with Dropbox!
4. Even non-Dropbox users can sync files via Dropbox if you invite them to share your directory.
5. There’s a free 2GB account for free.
6. Uploading/syncing huge amounts of files isn’t quite as painful as uploading to Mediafire, etc. Last night file transfers were roughly 20-35KB/s. Maybe those with better internet access can show you better rates.
7. It’s like using CVS or SVN as you have a checkbox when the files are updated.
8. You could also view the changes in your Dropbox account via the web user interface.
9. You could sync files with your Dropbox directory via web UI upload.

I actually might be missing on the other features because I just installed it last night and had so much fun that I simply had to blog about it now.

Packages are available for Fedora Core 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 7.10. The source is also available. Download Dropbox here!

Dependencies:

• GTK 2.12 or higherM
• GLib 2.14 or higher
• Nautilus 2.16 or higher
• Libnotify 0.4.4 or higher
• Wget 1.10 or higher

Make sure you have these dependencies before installing them, ne?

Please feel free to check out my screenshots on Flickr.

Other screenshots:
– My local Dropbox directory

– setting preferences on your Dropbox’s local directory

– Dropbox’s web user interface

– Account home on the web UI