The big announcement that the iPhone app of the year is soon to be available for Android Smartphone users. Somehow, I'm missing the excitement of this.
I visited the Instagram web site and their home page offers the following information:
It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.
Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented.
Oh yeah, did we mention it’s free?
There has to be more to this that meets the eye but their website doesn't offer it up. Nothing in that introduction gives me anything more than what I'm already doing. Android already has lots of really cool apps to edit and transform photos, and sharing them on Twitter or Facebook is also just a click or two away. Seriously, am I missing something?
Box app cloud storage app not improves and simplifies.
Free cloud storage: good. Very good.
If you have an active online life (computer, smartphone, photography, social networking), then you hopefully know how important it is to back up all your stuff. Awful things can happen. Your hard drive fries; you lose your SD card; your Smartphone gets stolen; some idiot with a crappy TV show in Las Vegas mistakenly reports you to Google and YouTube for stealing their video content when in fact the content was yours to begin with and they were essentially using it with your permission but Google didn't question the dufus ass and cancels your associated accounts (Google and YouTube) making all of your emails and videos inaccessible forever. Do I sound bitter about that last one? :)The point is, you don't want to lose your history because, at some time in the future, you may want to revisit a lot of that stuff.
A few years ago I sort of created my own cloud-like universe with the help of Gmail. Since they give you so much free space on a standard account (currenly more than 8 gig if I'm not mistaken), I just started emailing all of my digital stuff to myself which I could then access from anywhere that had Internet access. That works very well unless it's actually Gmail who shuts down your account, then you're screwed.
Flash drives became very helpful in my back-up life, but now my backpack has about 15 or 20 of them (2 gig to 16 gig) stuffed in a pocket and there really isn't any way to identify what's on them until you plug them in and look. Annoying!
Then, I discovered A-Drive, a free online storage, cloud site which give you 50 gig of space for free. I love it, and sometimes actually remember to upload to it.
Enter Box. Box is an online and Smartphone app which allows you to access your cloud from your desktop, laptop and Android device (or Blackberry and iPhone). They also give you 50 gig.
What makes using Box over ADrive (or many of the cloud storage sites) better is convenience. The app that you download on your device (iPhone or Android) makes it easy to upload on the fly, and if you want to do multiple files at once, you just log into your account on your desktop/laptop and upload away.
With Box you can also allow access to others and they can download and add to your folder.
A feature that I love is about the mobile app is that you can upload multiple files to your Box cloud at once. Here's how you do it: Open the folder which contains the files you want to upload (pics, music, docs, whatever). Then click on the Menu and select Share. Choose Box (download the app first, of course) and then check off the boxes you want to upload.
I'm sure there are many other applications for this application. I'll have to start thinking outside the Box.
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