Kevin does more with Dropbox
Kevin
Harter.
Kevin Harter- a real friendly type, who
knows a bunch about computers. He grew up infatuated with them and did
everything he could to use them more and more. Eventually, after working on PCs
for several years, he started his own computer store and repair place in his
hometown in Iowa. It’s been open since 1998 and the guy has been teaching at
the community college and writing for a few websites, including Obsessable, The
Unofficial Apple Weblog, and TechVi. You should meet him; His name is Kevin
Harter.
Wappwolf
Dropbox Automator
You’ve likely heard of Dropbox, the free
storage and synchronisation site that saves people from the pain of deleted
photos, music, documents and other files. You may well use it. But, as if
ensuring file longevity wasn’t enough in this world, Wappwolf has arrived with
all kinds of tricks to modify your file’ existence.
The California-based developer obviously
likes Dropbox, but what’s missing from file storage and synchronisations is
file manipulation. So to combat that, Wappwolf’s Dropbox Automator manipulates
your files according to you need, and has the potential to make you a fair bit
more productive.
Setup is simple. Head over to www.wappwolf.com and click the link to the
Dropbox Automator App. Once there, you just need to log into your Dropbox
account and choose whether or not Automator can have access to all or just one
of your folders. You can’t choose to only let it access multiple specified
folders, which is a bit odd. However, this isn’t a huge issue, since its
workings will only affect the folders you choose for file manipulation, even if
technically it has access to all of them. I suppose those who keep their date
well guarded might not like this slight limitation, but there’s a certain
amount of tacit trust in using any such applications, and if you use Dropbox
already you may not be perturbed.
In any case, once the selection has been
made, it’s on to choosing what you want Wappwolf to manipulate for you. And the
choice is rather incredible. Taking into considerations the types of files most
people will have in their Dropbox folders, and the many, many sorts of things
you could do with those, I’d wager you’ll be rather impressed. Wappwolf seems
to have chosen the most popular and useful of options.
There
are seven document options, 11 picture options, 12 general file options
There are seven document options, 11
picture options, 12 general file options – zip, unzip, upload to
FTP/Box/Evernote/basecamp/SkyDrive, rename, encrypt and decrypt – and three
‘send info’ options (to tweet, set a Facebook status or make use of a goo.gl
URL shortener). The one audio option is to ‘convert’ and you can choose from
eight filetypes to convert to.
When you’ve decided on an action, you hit
the ‘add action’ button, and any file you put into your specified folders will
be treated as you instructed. In tests I chose to convert to PDF any Word
document I placed in one folder, and it worked smoothly. But I could have had
them sent to my Kindle, Google Docs or a Slideshare account. I could even –
with some additional off-site permissions agreed with Xymo – have had PDFs
digitally signed, making them legally effective in all EU countries. Once any
actions have been performed, you’ll be informed by Dropbox through the
notification are of the taskbar, and any changed files will be placed in a
Processed folder in the selected folders you chose previously.
It’s really rather straightforward. It’s
really rather useful. And, if you’re fan of Dropbox, it’s absolutely worth
checking out.
Details
|
Price
|
Free
|
|
Developer
|
Wappwolf
|
|
Website
|
www.wappwolf.com
|
|
Required spec
|
Dropbox account, internet connection
|
Verdict
File maintenance and manipulation smartly
handled
