I recently discovered Drip, a new small menubar filesharing app developed by Scott Savarie (@ScottSavarie) and Florian Denis (@Olotiar), released last month. After I got to take a look at it, I think I maybe know where the drop-down menu redesign in the latest Dropbox beta introduced yesterday got partly inspired by. Drip is a small, really useful tool for sharing large files quick and completely without hassle.

Drip uses the servers of hosting service sendspace to store files. Sendspace offers a completely free data plan (called sendspace Lite) with which users can upload files sized up to 300 MB which are available for download for 30 days starting from the time of the newest download; after this period of time they get deleted. The free plan is ad-powered, so you need to click through some ads if you download a file from the sendspace website. But this is the only disadvantage: as far as I know from the sendspace FAQs, there ist no upload limit in total for free users. Perfect for quick, temporary file sharing of smaller, but also suited for quite large files. If you want to upload even larger files and store them for a longer time on sendspace, you can sign up for a Pro or Premium account which support larger file sizes and higher download bandwidth (see detailed plan information here).

Drip is your desktop companion for Mac if you use sendspace. Download it for free from the app website, install and launch, and you can immediately start uploading files. There is no signup needed, new users automatically are connected to a free sendspace account without having to login. If you want to be more flexible with using the free account (maybe you want to use the web upload interface) or if you are a Pro/Premium user, you can enter your login data for sendspace in app’s preferences (I’ll come to them in detail in a bit).

Uploading files works just like you would expect it: drag the file you want to upload for sharing onto the menubar icon, drop it, and it gets uploaded. If the upload is finished, the related sendspace.com download link is automatically copied to you clipboard for sharing.

If you drop a file onto Drip’s menubar icon or if you click on it, a really great-looking drop-down menu appears listing the last uploaded files. You can change its height to view more elements without scrolling using a small draggable element at the very bottom of the list — I state this feature, since the dragging indicator is designed a bit too small in my opinion and is hard to aim at. You can click on any file in the list to copy its download URL again. Using the preference icon which always appear when you hover over a file list element you can do even more actions. The drop-down menu which appears when you click on it (my personal UI highlight of Drip) offers you to delete the upload, remove the file from the list to keep Drip uncluttered, automatically share the file download link with your default email client, or re-upload the file if you need a new link for any reason.

As you can see, Drip is very versatile, but still drop-dead simple to use. It also features extensive settings to make it work just like you want it to. You can bring them up by clicking the settings button in the top right corner of the main drop-down menu. Apart from the aforementioned sendspace account login panel, you can also activate Growl notifications (see example below), set up upload completion sound, clear the whole file list, or let the operating system start Drip at launch. However, the best option available in the settings are the shortcuts. Besides the standard one to bring up the app window, you can also set a custom shortcut for uploading the last screenshot you took, a truly great feature for quick thought sharing or reporting bug fixes.

After I researched a bit about the current free data plans of sendspace, I decided to make Drip my default app for quick, temporary file sharing. I had accounts for Droplr and Cloudapp in the past, as well as a free Dropbox account. But non of those services supports large file uploads (or they didn’t work like with Cloudapp), or in case of Dropbox I had to intricately delete unused files to free space for new ones. With Drip, all this hassle is gone (at least for now). It’s not just a new app supporting another web hosting service in the game, version 1 is already a serious competitor for apps like Droplr and iCloud. I can’t wait to see if they manage to develop a fitting iOS client of it as well to have all the uploaded files and links available on the road. Currently, Drip is Mac-only. But if the app gets as popular as I think it will, this will surely change soon.

You can download Drip for free on the app’s website. 

Sparrow, the minimal email client for the Mac that recently gained with full Lion compatibility, received a new update in the Mac App Store, this time adding native integration with file sharing service CloudApp, a “pull to refresh” gesture to check for new messages, and a number of fixes and improvements aimed at enhancing the email experience and make it faster and more stable.

With CloudApp support, users are now able to drag & drop files into Sparrow’s compose window, and have the app automatically upload them to CloudApp and insert a clickable link in the message. Once authenticated with your CloudApp account in Sparrow’s preferences, every time you’d like to send an attachment through CloudApp, you won’t need to have CloudApp installed on your Mac: Sparrow will directly communicate with CloudApp’s servers and upload the file for you. The UI for this action is very simple — the top section of the message is a CloudApp “drop zone”, while the lower part at the bottom is for classic email attachments as explained by the developers in this article. There is a new cloud indicator in the top toolbar of the compose window to show the status of an upload, which will turn blue after it’s complete. Overall, CloudApp integration is well done, simple and useful if you share with CloudApp on a daily basis.

Sparrow 1.4 also comes with the “pull to refresh” gesture made popular by Loren Brichter’s Tweetie on the iPhone years ago, and later implemented by thousands of other App Store apps. In Sparrow, you can pull the inbox to check for new messages, and whilst I don’t think I’ll ever use this functionality as I like my email client to stay in the background and refresh every few minutes automatically, I assume some people who want to manually check for new messages will like this option.

As usual with every Sparrow update, there’s a series of bug fixes and improvements under the hood. Sparrow now syncs and sends emails faster than before, and Gmail-like reverse threads have been implemented in the conversation view. Sparrow is now compatible with Zoho and Lotus Domino, it’s got a new draft management system and the mail database has been improved, too.

Sparrow 1.4 can be considered a minor update, but it’ll make those who rely on CloudApp for their file sharing needs more efficient when dealing with email. You can get Sparrow 1.4 on the Mac App Store.

Among the new features of Lion that Apple touts on the Mac App Store and the OS’ official webpage, there is a new peer-to-peer file sharing functionality called AirDrop, which uses the Finder as a way to share files with Macs nearby through drag & drop. Acting as a replacement to the omnipresent USB stick and providing an easier approach to wireless file sharing than the Mac’s default “Drop box” feature, AirDrop wants to replace any physical media and alternative software solutions used to share documents with your friends, family, or colleagues that happen to have a Mac next to your machine. I can’t tell you how many times in the past I found myself using my MacBook next to a friend’s MacBook, and doing something as simple as sharing an .mp3 file required us to either go through the Mac’s Sharing settings in System Preferences, upload it online for a one-time usage, or rely on the typical USB thumb drive.

AirDrop is aimed at making file sharing easy, and secure at the same time. Before I delve deeper into its feature set though, here’s the list of computers Apple says are compatible with Lion’s AirDrop:

• MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 or newer)
• iMac (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010)

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A new patent detailed by Patently Apple today illustrates how Apple may implement file sharing between iOS devices in future versions of the iPhone and iPad. Whilst patent filings are no indication of features and hardware design choices coming in the next versions of operating systems and devices, they provide some sort of insight into what Apple engineers and designers have been researching to improve the technology or user experience. This latest patent offers a (possible) interesting solution to a common problem that have always affected owners of multiple iOS devices: it’s not easy to share files between them wirelessly, without a cable, without a computer. Whereas iCloud and the PC-Free initiative will focus on fixing this by cutting the cable requirement and constantly syncing documents between apps both on iOS and OS X, there are still some use cases in which a user might want to share a file quickly without uploading to iCloud first. Or, then again, owners of different devices with different iCloud accounts might find difficult to share files in seconds without having to rely on classic email or social sharing.

The patent details a technology that is capable of beaming files back and forth between devices thanks to “file sharing gestures” such as the “pouring motion” or regular flicks and swipes that will give users the illusion of throwing files off a screen, and onto a second device. With sound effects (Patently Apple reports the “vacuum cleaner” one) and animations, this new system sounds like an evolution of webOS’ existing “Touch to Share” feature that allows smartphones and the TouchPad to share, for example, webpages by simply touching each other’s screen. Apple’s proposed solution takes this idea a step further with the concept of animations, user gestures and file selection in-app to give users more control and “personality” over what’s being shared, and how.

Apple’s solution begins by stating that a user could make an intuitive, physical gesture with a first device, which could then be detected by one or more onboard motion sensors. The detected motion triggers an animation having a “physics metaphor,” where the object appears to react to forces in a real world, physical environment.

Apple’s patent spends a lot of time describing various animated physics metaphors that would have the iOS device’s interface react differently depending on the metaphor. Apple describes that the appearance of the interface could react to gravity, friction or drag, momentum, torque, acceleration, centripetal forces or any other force found in the real-world physical environment. The rate at which each object moves on an interface could be based on the size or “mass” of the file represented by the object. Larger files that have more “mass” could have their object animated to move slower in the interface while smaller files that have less “mass” could have their object animated to move faster in the interface.

The patent also details scenarios such as having iOS devices at work or school, and having to share files with colleagues or friends. The proposed system could scan for available iOS devices, and let users to exchange files with simple gestures. The concept reminds us of AirDrop, a new feature of OS X Lion that enables Mac owners to share files with computers nearby, provided they’ve granted authorization for incoming documents.

Last, the filings detail how these new file sharing features and commands could also be used to send files to a network, rather than a device. It is unclear from the report whether this patent is based off Apple’s rumored interest in NFC technology (admittedly, this sounds a lot like it), so make sure to hit Patently Apple to check out all the details and illustrations.

I share a lot of screenshots and photos between my iPhone and Mac every day. Up until today, I’ve relied on third-party apps like iFiles to import pictures into its library and get them on my Mac using Cyberduck, which can connect to iFiles’ built-in WebDAV server. PhotoToMac, a $1.99 app by Galarina, improved my workflow with a system that allows me to import photos and videos without using additional Mac apps. Files shared with PhotoToMac, in fact, end up directly in the Finder. (more…)

The iPad has no file browser. There’s no way to aggregate online services like Dropbox and MobileMe in one place by default. The iPad has no visible file structure to let users create folders, move files around, create new files in specific locations.

Still, is it enough to not come up with an app that overrides Apple’s limitations and allows you to build your own file browser? An app that is capable of collecting online services in a single interface, enabling you to download files from the internet and achieve a pretty good cloud-based workflow?

Actually, there are some apps with these features in the App Store, and I’ve tried many of them. Air Sharing HD is probably one of the best around, at least I used to believe until I stumbled upon the first release of iFiles for iPad.

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Back in October I wrote a post about 9 Beta applications for Mac OS X you should check out and, guess what, Droplr was in. Droplr has been an invite-only app / service for a long time, one of those apps people never stopped searching for an invite as rumor was “Droplr is freakin’ awesome”. I was in the private / beta testing group of the application and it surely was a great, easy to use app, seamlessly integrated with Mac OS X. Yesterday Droplr 1.0 finally landed and here’s why you should go download it now.

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During my blogging workflow, I costantly need to upload many files. Text, photos, screencasts, .zip archives..I need to share them with my friends and co-workers almost every hour.

Two weeks ago I stumbled upon this new app, FileShuttle, which has totally changed my workflow.

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