I personally love the Dropbox file sharing program, and it’s not hard to explain why — instant synchronization across all three major platforms is inherently awesome. Drop a file into your Dropbox on one computer and it shows up almost instantly on all your machines.

MakeUseOf writers have highlighted Dropbox’s virtues more than once. In 2008 Dave interviewed its founder, Drew Houston; Angelina suggested several interesting ways for students to use Dropbox; Jackson reviewed Dropbox’s iPhone app; and Jeffry showed Mac users how to remotely trigger a file download using Dropbox.

But as useful as the Dropbox file sharing program is on its own, it’s even better when used in tandem with the applications you already know and love. Whether it’s remotely starting a Bittorrent download, synchronizing your calendar and to-do list or making your video game habit instantly portable, Dropbox can make multiple computers function as though they are one.

Start a Bittorrent Download From Anywhere

Bittorrent is the peer to peer technology of choice for most Internet users, but it’s not exactly easy on bandwidth. So if you think of something you want to download while you’re at work, running bittorrent on your work computer is probably a good way to get fired. You can, however, easily start a bittorrent download on your home desktop machine or media center from work with a little bit of Dropbox magic.

Most bittorrent programs are capable of watching a given folder for .torrent files. Point your program towards a folder in your Dropbox file sharing program, and volia. If you leave your desktop computer on while you’re at work, you can add a .torrent file to the folder in your Dropbox from work and your download will automatically start — at home.

Can’t install Dropbox on your work machine? No problem; just use Dropbox’s web interface to upload the files.

Keep Your Calendars Synchronized

I’m sure many of you use Google Calendar for your online calendar needs — it’s an easy-to-use calendar you can access anywhere. But online calendars are only useful when you have an Internet connection, leaving you without you data in those (admittedly increasingly rare) instances when there’s no nearby WiFi connection.

Dropbox’s strength being  the ability to make data on one computer accessible from all your computers, combining Dropbox with your desktop calendar application of choice can deliver a great compromise between an offline and and online calendar: simply save your calendar file to your Dropbox. Your data will be accessible when you’re offline, and you’ll even be able to make changes. As soon as the computer you made those changes on connects to the Internet, however, they will take affect on all your computers.

Mozilla’s Sunbird works beautifully this way. Simply create a new iCal file and save it in your Dropbox, then open the file with Sunbird on all your systems. Now all changes you make to your calendar will be visible on all your systems.

Sync Your To-Do List or Desktop Wiki

For many, Remember the Milk is the ultimate to-do list, but if suffers the same limitation online calendars do: you need to be online to access it. If you find for this reason that your ultimate to-do list strategy is an old-fashioned text document with a list of tasks, Dropbox can make that document accessible on all your computers. Simply move your text to-do list to your Dropbox and you’re set.

Alternatively, if you use a desktop wiki such as Zim [Windows/Ubuntu] or Tomboy [cross-platform] to keep track of your current tasks, consider storing your wiki’s repository in your Dropbox. I myself use Zim to store everything from phone numbers I need to remember to wireless passcodes I need when visiting friends and family. Dropbox ensures I’ll never forget to transfer a critical piece of data from my desktop to my netbook.

Make Your Gaming Instantly Portable

All work and no play makes Dropbox sound very dull. If you love playing video games on your media center computer, or your desktop computer, but wish you could continue the fun on your netbook during your bus commute to work, Dropbox can help with that too. Many games will give you the opportunity to save your game to a certain folder; simply save to your Dropbox and you can continue on your netbook without missing a beat (assuming the game’s installed on that computer as well.)

Are you a retro-gaming fanatic who likes to always have your emulator on-hand? Most emulators allow you to configure where to save your progress for all games. Point your favorite program towards a dedicated folder in your Dropbox and it will save your game to all your computers without any effort on your part.

Conclusion

There you have it: four unique ways to combine Dropbox with programs you already use on a regular basis. The underlying theme may be the same —data from a given program automatically synchronizing between all your computers — but adding such automatic synchronization can change the way you interact with your computers.

If your calendar has a date on one computer you can access it on another. If Link is about to save the princess on your media center, you can finish the job on your netbook. The best part: once you set up programs in this manner everything happens without any intervention from you, allowing you to focus on whatever you’re working on. This is how computers should work.

Download Dropbox here, if you haven’t already. The service is free for a 2 gigabyte account, and you won’t need more space than that to apply the tricks described above.

Spread out over severalarticles, I’ve mentioned that I’m sort of a multitasker. Not a very good one though, I have to admit. And every Mac user will concur that aside fromSpaces, Exposé is one of the most useful tools to help you triumph over the land mine that is multitasking.

From Panther to Tiger to Leopard and now, Snow Leopard, we’ve seen Exposé slowly maturing from a young cub to the ferocious beast it is today. There’s just so much more you can do with Exposé now compared to a year or two ago. And sticking with the multitasking motif, I’ll show you6 different ways you can make use of Exposé in your daily workflow, shaving precious seconds off your regular routine.

Quick Look in Exposé

Quick Look is now integrated into Exposé, allowing you to preview a window without exiting Exposé. Invoke the All Windows Exposé view and while your mouse cursor is hovering over a window (highlighted by a blue rim), press Spacebar. You are now previewing that window in full resolution but wait, you’re still in Exposé. You may either press Spacebar again to return to the All Windows view or click on the preview (or press Enter) to select that window or the Escape key to exit Exposé.

This works wonders if you have a lot of windows open and they end up being generated as tiny thumbnails. There’s no more guesswork involved. You can now be sure of the window you’re selecting while still in Exposé.

Cycle through apps

In Snow Leopard, Apple introduced Dock Exposé, where you can now click and hold on any Dock icons to invoke an Application Window Exposé view. While in that view, you can press Tab and cycle through any running application. Pressing the accent (`) key will reverse the cycle order.

You can achieve the same effect via the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Keep pressing the Tab key until you reach an application you want to view in Application Window Exposé view and hit the 1 key while still holding on to Command. You can now release the Command key and press Tab or the accent key to cycle through applications on your Dock.

Reorder windows by name and type

If you have loads of open windows, viewing them individually and finding the right one in Exposé can be tricky. The order in which Exposé windows seem to be arranged in Snow Leopard remains a mystery to me. However, you can arrange the windows alphabetically if you hit Command+1 while in Exposé. Pressing Command+2 groups similar apps together in no particular (known) order.

In the screencast below, I tried to demonstrate the difference between reordering by name and by type.

Select window by name

Let’s just say that you’re working with a lot of windows and you’d like find a specific one while in Exposé. By typing the first few letters of the window you’re looking for, Exposé will refocus the highlighted window to the closest match.

In the screencast below, watch my mouse cursor as it highlights the ‘Music’ folder. I begin to type “thi” and the highlight jumps to wrap around Things. Press Enter to select that window and exit Exposé.

Quit and hide apps

Notice that now, even in Exposé, the Dock is still in view. If you left-click on any dock icon, a contextual menu will pop up to provide you with options to quit, hide, keep in Dock, open at login and show in Finder.

In the same vein, you can also quit an app while using the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Hit the Tab key until you reach the app you want to quit then press the Q key, still holding on the Command key. The app in question will quit without interfering with Application Switcher.

In the screencast below, I’ll demonstrate how both of these methods look like when they are performed.

Only show windows from current Space

As I said above, Spaces is another friend all for mutitasking. Alas, a caveat — when invoking Exposé in Snow Leopard with Spaces activated, all windows from every Space is shown. To make Exposé display only the windows from the current Space, a little Terminal magic is required.

Launch Terminal then copy and paste these commands in one at a time and hit Enter after each one.

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE

killall Dock

To restore Exposé back to its original settings:

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces

killall Dock

So there you have it, 6 useful tips to help you manage Exposé and multitask more efficiently. I hope that they come in useful.

Lala has become my music player of choice, simply because it is, as far as I know, the most affordable way to purchase music on the Internet. I’vereviewed the Lala music player for another site, and an how-to article has been published here on MUO.

Lala has become my main jukebox and is used ten times more than I use iTunes. With my setup, it doesn’t take much effort to access my Lala account. This article explains the method I use as a Mac user. I’m sure there are similar applications for PC users.

What You Need

FluidApp 
Butler
Airfoil (optional)

Each of the applications, except for Airfoil, can be downloaded for free. Donations, of course, are accepted.

Creating a Site Specific Browser for Lala.com

The Lala music player lacks a dedicated desktop web application to play music. You must sign into your account and use its web application. To get a dedicated player of sorts onto your desktop, you can use FluidApp, a “site specific browser” (SSB), for a dedicated website or page. Making your Lala account homepage a SSB is like making it an application, which means it’s less likely to get lost in the clutter of all your other web pages on your desktop, especially if you use some of its advance features that I will describe below.

Instructions for creating an SSB using the application are clearly explained on its website, so I won’t rehash them here. But the following are some extra instructions for how to specifically use FluidApp to create a “Lala Player” on your desktop.

• First off, when you’re creating a SSB for the Lala music player, you’ll want a well designed icon, so download Goggans’s design posted on his Flickr photostream(once you use the Fluid creation, it won’t have the black border that you see here.)

• After your SSB is created, you can customize the browser some.
• Your SSB includes a menu bar and a set of preferences similar to what you find on any web browsing application. In the FluidApp preferences you can choose to style the window of your SSB as I have done here. I like using the black top framing or “HUD” for all my SSBs. That makes them distinctive from my main web browsing windows.

• There’s also an option in Preferences (click on Behavior Preferences) in which you can have a SSB window immediately hide when it’s not in the foreground. Using this option means you can open up your Lala Player, select a playlist or album to play, and when you click to another application, the browser window gets out of the way so you can get back to what you’re doing.

Use Butler for Quick Access

Like any other application, your Lala.com FluidApp will appear in your dock for easy access. But in my opinion, using a launcher application like Butler or Quicksilverprovides even faster access.

Butler allows you to assign a Hot Key or Hot Corner to an application to launch. Since I’m more of a mouse user, I assigned a Hot Corner to my Lala app. It’s easy to do: Start up Butler and click on its Configuration tab. Drag the Lala FluidApp to the Hidden section. With the application selected, assign a Hot Key or Hot Corner that works best for you.

AirFoil (optional)

Lala is beta testing an iPhone application for its site, but until the app is released, you can use a free iPhone application called AirFoil Speakers Touch to hear music on your Lala account on your iPhone or iPod touch. The only catch with using the AirFoil Speakers is that you have to purchase Airfoil for Mac ($25), which sends audio remotely from your Mac to its mobile counterpart speaker application. This is a cheaper solution than getting Apple‘s limited AirPort Express, which can only be used with iTunes. Of course, you can also AirFoil to stream any other audio coming from your computer.

Check out the controller. Camo, white, glows. Badass

Click here to download:

IMG_0107.MOV (3280 KB)

Sent from my iPhone

Monday November 09, 2009 01:39 PM

Google today announced that it has agreed to acquire mobile advertising firm AdMob in a deal valued at $750 million. AdMob is currently the world's largest mobile advertising provider and is utilized by many of the top ad-supported iPhone applications.

The deal will help Google in its efforts to develop more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats. As this ecosystem continues to grow, the company expects these new marketing media to offer significant benefits:

- Advertisers will be better able to engage mobile users with AdMob's ad formats
- Publishers and developers will be able to monetize their content more effectively, which has benefits for the wider mobile ecosystem
- Users will see more relevant ads and ultimately get access to more ad-supported content and applications - improving their mobile experience

We've written in the past about how mobile phones are becoming an increasingly indispensable part of our daily lives, and we continue to see how great devices with full Internet browsers and vibrant app marketplaces are driving an explosion of usage. In fact:

- iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google's 5x mobile search growth over the past two years
- And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]