Three Free, Offbeat Ways to Handle Files
May 5th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 2 CommentsTweet This
Ever since I was a DOS user years ago, noodling around with file managers such as Lotus Magellan and Norton Commander, I’ve tried to keep my eye out for useful, unusual approaches to managing files. If you collect these tools, even the offbeat ones, you can boost your efficiency. In this post, I’ll round up three offbeat, free tools I use for handling files that can help you with file management tasks.
Mike Gunderloy previously covered Openomy which I’ve been using recently. This is a free online storage service, and because it only offers 1GB of free capacity (compared to ADrive, where you can get 50GB) it wouldn’t stand out in my eyes except that maximum capacity isn’t what it’s all about.
Openomy has a REST-based API and a unique, tag-based file system that allows you to expose some files you choose to store online to other applications. This is interesting to play with, and challenges the idea that online storage is just for securely backing up files.
ExamDiff is an interesting visual file comparison tool for Windows users. It can automatically update you when it detects changes to files that you want to track, or the visual displays of differences between files can be useful if you often work with a few versions of files.
If you’re a Windows user and Windows Explorer is your tool of choice for working with files, give Servant Salamander a try. It’s a very simple, two-pane file manager that often keeps me from having to open up more than one instance of Windows Explorer. Funny name, though.
For more unusual approaches to handling files, check my previous post. There, you’ll find unusual online tools for working with files, such as Box.net.
Do you know of any good, free file management applications?
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Organizing your files on the Mac using tags can be done with Punakea. It will also give you a nice tagcloud from where you can browse your documents.
I just commented on a service for a different article on this site here.
For the sake of brevity I’ll just repost my comments here as they are equally applicable:
I’m currently using a startup Cloud storage provider called SMEStorage (www.smestorage.com). They have not officially launched yet but these guys have some cool stuff. Firstly their back-end is Amazon S3 so the storage is secure. Currently you subscribe to their service but they tell me they are soon going to open it up so you can enter your own Amazon S3 keys and pay a $1 a month for their services.
You can do all the usual stuff like upload your files, tag etc. They have a nice File Browser. They also allow file sharing via email in which you can set a deadline for the link to the file to expire which is nice. The killer feature for me is the group sharing functionality in which you can create a group, add users to the group and then share a file with the group or individual users – I use this a lot as a mechanism to keep partners up to date with collateral for my business.
They released an API a while back so you can access all these features via their REST API, and I’m currently testing the beta of a Firefox plug-in that uses this API.
Lastly I’m beta testing their IPhone version which I have to say is pretty amazing. This is at http://thesmespace.com/smeutils/msmestorage/.
As far as I know these guys have not launched yet and there is little documentation but they have put a lot thought into what they are doing and I thought they deserved a mention as they are taking the cloud services and layering useful functionality on top of it.