Notational Velocity & Dropbox

I like my applications to be simple, intuitive and elegant, keeping the user interface minimal and only showing me the options that I really need. This is one of the things I love about the Mac, as there is always a little development house creating these perfect applications, for example Coda or Acorn.

A few years ago I went on the search for the perfect note taking application and I came back with Notational Velocity for the Mac. This application has the world's most simple user interface (with no buttons), but it allows you to create, edit and search for notes in just seconds, which is exactly what I want from a note taking application.

When comparing Notational Velocity to the competition (Evernote and OneNote) you quickly discover that it lacks hundreds of "power" features, but this really doesn't matter, because all I want is an application to take notes. If I want a word processor, I'll head over to Pages or Word and if I need to grab screenshots or web clips then I'll use LittleSnapper.

There is however one feature I wish Notational Velocity did have, and that's cloud synchronisation. For example I want my notes to be instantly and automatically available across all my devices, not just the one I took the note on.

Thankfully, through the power of Dropbox this is easily achieved. For those not familiar with Dropbox, it is a free "cloud" file synchronisation service. Therefore with a few simple changes to Notational Velocity, it can be used to automatically synchronise all your notes, making them available from any device with a browser.

To set-up Notational Velocity and Dropbox for the first time, follow the steps below:

1. Download and install Notiaional Velocity and Dropbox.
2. In Notational Velocity, navigate to "Preferences > Notes > Storage".
3. For "Store and read notes on disk as", select "Plain Text Files".
4. In the Finder, drag your Notational Data folder (by default in ~/Library/Application Support/) to the Dropbox folder in your home directory.
5. Dropbox will now synchronize your notes across all your devices and the cloud.

To access the same notes from Notational Velocity on a different computer, follow the steps below:

1. Follow steps 1–3 above.
2. Choose "Preferences > Notes > Read notes from folder".
3. Select the Notational Data folder inside your Dropbox folder.

You now have the best of both worlds. The best note taking application for the Mac and the ability to access and edit your notes from any device with a broswer. Perfect!

Dropbox Hits 1.0

I'm a huge fan of Dropbox. It's one of those perfect applications that once installed you never even realise is running. However in reality it is secretly backing up all your files (including previous versions) as well as synchronising your data across all your computers and mobile devices. For anyone that works in IT with multiple computers it is a must have application.

Today, the Dropbox development team announced the release of the highly anticipated Dropbox 1.0. Check out a summary of the new features below:

Hundreds of Bug Fixes - Dropbox 1.0 is a major release and as a result the development team have spent thousands of hours fixing bugs, such as invalid file names on Windows, weird Unicode normalizations, Word and Excel file locking, abnormal symlinks hierarchies, case sensitive file systems on Mac, TrueCrypt support...the list goes on.

Better Performance - The client-side sync engine has been completely re-architected to optimize the response time, scale, and resource consumption.

Better User Experience - The initial setup wizard on all three platforms has been enhanced to make it easier to get started using Dropbox. The preference menus have also been re-organised to offer a more intuitive user experience. Finally and most significantly for Mac users, the client application has been rewritten in native Cocoa, so Dropbox looks and feels like it was made for the Mac. It also brings down the Mac download size by 20%.

Selective Sync - The biggest new feature is selective sync. This is useful if you have a netbook or a computer with a tiny hard drive, which makes syncing your entire Dropbox difficult. Also you might not want certain files on your home computer to pop up on your work computer. Selective Sync solves these problems! You now can choose which folders get downloaded to which computers. This saves you time so you don’t have to sync stuff you don’t need.

Extended Attribute Sync – Finally, syncing resource forks have historically been a pain for Mac users. In case you don’t know, resource forks are a secret area of a file that certain applications (like Quicken, Quark, and OmniGraffle) use to store important data. Most sync programs today completely ignore these forks, which results in a corrupted file on the other end. But worry not! Resource forks and other extended attributes now work great with Dropbox.

Check out the new preferences menu for the Mac, now fully written in Cocoa to give it a true Mac look and feel.

As previously stated the majority of changes have happened under the hood, however the biggest new feature can be found in the preference menu under "Advanced". From here you can select certain folders within your Dropbox folder that won't be synced to the cloud. My hope is that at some point the Dropbox team will natively enable you to sync folders outside of the main Dropbox account, without you having to use symbolic links.

For more information on Dropbox check out my previous article "Get Dropbox" and once you're convinced head over to the Dropbox website for the free download.

Dropbox for the iPhone

Dropbox is a fantastic cross platform file-syncing tool. I use it to sync all documents from my Windows 7 PC to my Macs. This guarantees I always have the most up to date data to hand, with no need to backup or transport it on external media.

Well now the service just got even more compelling with the release of their official iPhone/iPod Touch application.

Once installed, Dropbox provides access and to your files and lets you open any file supported by your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can also upload pictures and videos, download any file for offline viewing or create a "public URL" for easy sharing.

The current free account offered by Dropbox gives you 2GB of data storage, however you can easily expand that by either referring other users or paying a subscription fee. To download the iPhone/iPod Touch application, head over to the App store on iTunes and pick it up for free. For more details on Dropbox check out my preview article "Get Dropbox" posted earlier this year.

Get Dropbox

On a daily basis I use three PC's (Windows XP, 7 Beta and Ubuntu) and three Mac's (All OS 10.5). Each computer has a specific use whether it be work, personal, media center, gaming rig or just for testing. One thing that has always been a nightmare is making sure that all of my data is available across all computers. In the past I have attempted to store everything on portable storage, however that has never proven particularly successful due to issues such as loss, lack of security, capacity constraints and file system compatibility (also just remembering to bring it with me).

Thankfully dropbox has the answer. A fast, secure, reliable and cross platform cloud storage solution that automatically synchronises all your data instantly online and across an infinite number of computers. Dropbox works on just about any platform (OS X, Windows and Linux) and can also be accessed directly from the browser. This ensures that wherever you are in the world, or whichever computer you are working on, you will always have access to all of your data and any changes that you make will instantly be updated and backed-up.

Dropbox also has many advance features such as file recovery, version control, public access and much more. I suggest you watch the dropbox screencast courtesy of getdropbox.com to learn more.

Although dropbox’s primary use is for file synchronisation between multiple computers, the user community has come up with some very clever and original ways to extend its functionality. For example one user is using dropbox to steer and coordinate multiple tractors on a farm. Another example is for security, whereby if the user’s computer is stolen it automatically takes screenshots and images from the integrated camera and automatically saves the outputted files to their dropbox folder. To see how other users are using dropbox be sure to check out the community forum.

Finally, it should be noted that dropbox is 100% free for your first 2GB of storage and therefore you have no excuse not to go and try it out right now from getdropbox.com.