Filed under: Macintosh, Productivity, Beta, Web
CloudApp: Terrible name, useful little app.
by Matt Heerema Oct 22nd 2009 at 1:00PM
There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp. A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".
Three possibilities crossed my mind:
- Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
- Twitter phishing scam
- (remote possibility) an actual app.
At the time, the link lead you to the "beta signup" page which asked for your Twitter credentials. My immediate reaction: "Wow, scam it is."
I followed @getcloudapp out of curiosity (if it was a social study, I wanted to see the results.) Later in the day, we were told that if you were one of the first 1000 followers, you were automatically signed up for the beta. A month later, I got my beta invite via Twitter DM. I bit, signed up, and was pleasantly surprised. It was indeed an actual app, and a relatively useful one at that.
Cloud.app is an application that blurs the line between the Mac OS X desktop and the cloud (or internet, if you will). While I still think CloudApp is a terrible name, the application gives you a menubar icon (a neat little cloud) to which you can drag a file, files, or folder from your finder, or a few other supported apps. (You can also set a hotkey for this action.) Those files are automatically uploaded to Cloud.app's servers, zipped, assigned a unique URL at the cld.ly domain. The URL is then copied to your clipboard for pasting at your discretion. This also works with URLs (or the currently open Web page, via hotkey) and acts as an URL shortener service. All in all, a simple, unobtrusive, and quite useful little app.
As it is in beta, there is a support forum with issues being reported fairly regularly. I'd assume amongst those issues lie some security holes, so I'd be careful WHAT you share, but this thing has potential. CloudApp also prohibits beta testers from sharing screenshots of the application, which is why we can only tease you with a cloud icon. But we'll have more information for you when we can.
The jury is still out on possibilities #1 and #2 though.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
sodapop said 4:33PM on 10-22-2009
I still don't get it. Its online storage and a URL-shortener?
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Matt Heerema said 11:25AM on 10-23-2009
"Storage" is a bit of a strong word. The intention is short-term file sharing.
David said 12:02AM on 10-23-2009
The new RapidShare for Mac users?
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Mike said 11:19AM on 10-23-2009
Interesting, but you could use a pubic Dropbox folder to do something fairly similar, no?
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Matt Heerema said 11:25AM on 10-23-2009
You sure could, without the tiny, http://cld.ly/ URL. Also, you cannot shorten URLs with Dropbox. Dropbox would also require you to drag stuff into the dropbox folder. This removes a few steps from the process.
canelson said 6:03PM on 11-05-2009
I think papaya is more useful than this one, but is not free. And File Shuttle does the same thing but works with your own server for free.
http://lightheadsw.com/papaya/
http://getfileshuttle.com/
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