The Cloud as Your Mobile Shared Disk

Although I’ve mentioned it in the past, I want to do a quick review of Dropbox, a “cloud network file system” for all your devices.  Although I had Dropbox installed for a while, the power of it really didn’t hit me until I talked about it with my friend Bill and using my new iPad.  I realized how it could solve several problems and truly further my goals for living in the cloud (compute wise that is).  If you need to share files between multiple PCs, phone, tablets (yours or with other people), this is the way to go.  You get all of this, wait for it..., for free.  You can sign-up for Dropbox for free and receive 2GB of space.

After the break, I’ll explian more about what it is, some of the key features, and a few use cases to demonstrate the benefits.

Cloud Docs on the iPad

I wanted to be able to continue to use the cloud for editing my documents in Google Docs.  If you need a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation editor that will open your Google documents, or equivalent Microsoft product files, try Docs to Go.

My attempt to use the rich text editing in Google Docs on my iPad 2 was a dismal failure.  Although Google offered “desktop mode” from the iPad Browser, I would designate it as #FAIL for the iPad.  This forced me to look for a real solution for rich text editors for the iPad and I was pleasantly surprised.  As proof of my success, most of this article was written using the iPad with “Docs to Go” and an Apple bluetooth keyboard.  Combined with Google Docs and Dropbox, Using Docs To Go is a very powerful tool for document editing on the go.

After the break, I’ll compare some core capabilities of Office2 HD and Docs To Go.