The Best Free Online File Storage & Sharing Service

Everyone needs one of these free online file storage / sharing service one of these days to easily send large files to your colleagues, clients or friends.

The biggest gripes with the many big names in online file storage services like YouSendIt, Box.net, is not the amount of space you can store files in your online storage, but the cap on the filesize of the file that you upload at any one time.

Even if you have unlimited amount of storage space like MediaFire for example, having only 100MBs of file transfer limit might not make much sense to most. I have felt “cheated” on several occassions by signing up for an online file storage service thinking that I have so much disk space only to realize later that I can only upload a few MBs each time, until I found Drop Box!

Drop Box

Drop box (Web, Mac & PC) is like an online file storage service on steroids. On top of a:

• 2GB free online storage (paid option – 50GB of storage space @ $9.99/month or $99/year) and
• unlimited file transfer limit (if you use the desktop client) / 350MB (if you use the web app),

you also get a whole lot of other conveniences not seen on other services:

Menu Bar Item

Download the desktop client from Dropbox’s main website. Upon completing installation, you’ll find the Dropbox icon on your menu bar where you’ll see how many percent of your storage space has been used, which files on your Dropbox you’ve made recent changes to:

Dropbox Folder

A “Dropbox” folder will also be created as one of your many folders in your home folder. This means you can drag and drop files into this folder just like any of your normal folders with the advantage of being able to access your files online, on another computer or anywhere else! Installing Dropbox on 2 different computers means you’ll see your files on both computers. I just love how cloud computing integrates with desktop computing

Also, your files are always safe as all data is transferred over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage.:

Copy Link to share file

Here’s the most exciting part, right clicking on any file in your Dropbox enables you to copy the files’ direct link, so that you can send the link to your friends to download that file! Sharing can’t get any easier can it?

Any folders created in the “Photos” folder in Dropbox is a Gallery, right clicking on it will enable you to copy the gallery link and share it with your friends!

My public gallery from one of my folders in the Photos folder called “Pictures from iPhone”:

Drag, Drop and Forget

Just like some of you, I hate uploading huge files using the sometimes clunky web interface, talking about huge files, most free online file storage service don’t even let you upload huge files to start with. Dropbox lets you drag and drop your huge file into your Dropbox folder and immediately uploads it in the background (no filesize limit on file transfer). You’ll see a spinning gear on the Dropbox icon in your menubar indicating that upload is in process. A “tick” indicates that upload is complete. But of course if you like using the web app, you have it too:

Web App (AJAX goodness)

You can also access all your Dropbox files online!

Among many web app features, you can see your recent changes of your Dropbox:

Upload files through the web app:

See and administrate your folders and files:

Undelete files!

Isn’t this the best, all rounded and most thoughtful online file storage service around?

SUBERNOVA – Project Management for Rockstar Freelancers

We’ve just launched the online project management service, SUBERNOVA!

One year+ ago when I first started out as a freelancer, I tried looking for an online project management service that we can use anywhere, on any browser. An app that looks good is also one of my criteria.

Yes there are indeed a bunch of them and they are very rich in feature, but in fact there are too many features I’ll never use like communicating with groups of people, an online calendar, file storage etc. Why wouldn’t I use the calendar or file storage feature? Having used my own native calendaring system for some time (iCal) there’s no reason to scatter both my personal and work appointments all over the place. Also, as I am a web designer hosting my own website, I have abundant storage space waiting to be used.

Let alone, if you’re a solo worker, you don’t need to communicate with co-workers.

Eventually I couldn’t find one suitable online project management service that can justify the price I am paying for, so we decided to build one ourselves.

SUBERNOVA

SUBERNOVA is a web based project management tool to help solo designers, writers, bloggers, etc manage their projects, milestones, clients, track time, get reminders for important deadlines and manage project related links and inspirations all in one intuitive and elegant user interface.

Project Overview

In project view, you can view all your projects and it’s vital data at a glance. How much time do I have left, have the project been quoted, invoiced or paid etc. There’s also an integrated timer attached to every project. SUBERNOVA will remind you via email when a project is due.

Time Tracking

With the time tracking feature, you can track your time easily with a click of a button. The timer button is attached to every project item, so it is always available when you need it. The program will also calculate the cost based on your hourly rate that you have previously set in your settings.

Milestones

Some point of time in your freelancing career you’ll get one of those huge projects, the best way to complete them is by breaking them down into smaller chunks with a due date for each so that it can see you through completion. Similar to “Projects”, SUBERNOVA will remind you via email when any of your milestones are due.

Clients

We already have our client’s number on our phones, their emails in the address book, what we need are more meaningful information we can’t find in other places, stuff like the total projects we have with them, the total revenue made from them. You can even rate your clients so you can sort them from your favorite to least favorite clients.

Links

For every project that I have worked on, there’re bound to be link references sent from clients, or links that I’ve came across during my research, but there is always no place to store them. What better place to save your project related links than in your project management program itself?

Reminders

SUBERNOVA will send you email reminders on the eve and on the day of every project or milestones deadline. Optionally, you can turn email reminders off in your settings if you don’t like getting bugged.

You can also set your hourly rate and renew your account easily in the settings window.

Subscription Cost

Update:
*For a limited time only, if you upgrade your account by 1st Jun 2009, you’ll get a 40% discount off the original price of $120. If you upgrade during your trial period, the one year credit will be added to your account on top of your remaining trial period.

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SUBERNOVA gives you 30 days free to try out the app, subsequently the price of the annual fee is $120, that’s only $10 a month. Way lower than most competing services because you’re not paying for features you’ll never use.

Turn Web Apps into Desktop Apps with Fluid

As a web designer, I spend a large amount of time on the internet, using lots of web apps like Freshbooks, to send and track estimates and invoices to my clients, SQL Buddy, a much more beautiful alternative to PHPmyAdmin which I have installed on my own hosting server to manage mySQL databases, Google Reader, to keep myself up to date with my favourite news, and the list goes on.

If you’re like me, you will wish that the developers have built the web apps native for Mac OS X, so that your browser won’t be cluttered with too many tabs. I’m not saying that by turning all your web apps into desktop apps won’t clutter up your dock, but at least resource hungry web apps that are AJAX or Flash driven (eg. Picnik or Photoshop Express) won’t consume too much memory for your browser’s liking.

Meet Fluid (Free)

Fluid not only convert your frequently used web apps into desktop apps, or Site Specific Browsers (SSBs), it also does a little more. Take Google Reader or Gmail for example, you’ll be able to see unread counts as a dock badge on your dock icon like this (also applies to Gmail):

If you use Twitter, you can even turn Hahlo.com (a Twitter web app client optimized for iPhone) into a menu item, complete with Growl notifications, watch the video below to see how to do that.

Here’s a couple of web apps I have converted into a Mac OS X native desktop application:

Google Reader

mySQL Database – SQL Buddy

Freshbooks

The possibilities are endless. For instance, I like to manage mySQL databases as a standalone application so that I can put it on my other screen without needing to switch to my browser to manage a database during a development process. If you don’t have dual monitors, switching to a web app is only a matter of Cmd+TAB.

Coupled with QuickSilver, Launchbar or any other application launchers, it’s even easier to launch your frequently used web apps quickly, avid app launcher users will know what I mean.

How does the app work?

Converting a web app into a Mac app is easy, launch Fluid and you’ll be greeted by a user friendly window. Enter the URL of the web app you’re converting, the name of the app, and choose between using the website’s favicon as a dock icon (not recommended as your icon will be blurry), or choose your own icon (highly recommended). If you have an image file eg. png, jpg, gif, bmp, but not sure how to convert it into a Mac icon, go here, or if you don’t mind paying for a native Mac OS X icon convertor, here’s a good looking and functional one.

It’s that easy, the following are more videos to learn more about Fluid (the TinyURL feature is really handy):

The Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in:

Fluid TinyURL Features:

Enjoy!