Posts tagged: reblog this
First off, check out the awesome video below. If you’re reading this in the Tumblr dashboard, you’ll need to click through to see it. Please do.
I just noticed over on iamdonald.com ↑ this ↑ gorgeous video — and it was huge! I did a little digging and realized that he had posted it not as a video post but as a quote post.
So if your theme has room for gorgeous high-res-y-ness, and you (like me) would like to show large embeds of videos on it, then just drop an embed with a larger size into a text or quote post. Of course, it’s a pain to have to make fellow Tumblr users click out of the dashboard, but it’s worth it to see those videos huge!
Dear Apple,
Why have you not already used just a tiny fraction of the engineering horsepower you no doubt posses, to make iDisk what it truly ought to be? What? What’s that?… “what should it be,” you ask?… Well, funny you should ask; let me tell you what iDisk should be, in a word: Dropbox. You may have heard of it? It’s this little upstart-turned-juggernaut in your backyard that has made you look like a crotchety old fool, sitting on your decade-old WebDav technology and forcing people to hate you whenever they try to use it with any degree of efficiency or reliability. A few bullet points might be in order here to quantify the ways in which Dropbox embarrasses you (or ought to):
- Speed. There is simply no comparison. I put a file in Dropbox, it’s in my friend’s dropbox in seconds.
- Ease of use. I never think about Dropbox. It is as if it isn’t there. Except that it IS there, making my digital life easier. Dropbox is transparent. It’s just there, and I just put crap in it. iDisk acts like a poorly written third-party plugin. I can store important files, even application settings, in Dropbox and KNOW that they sync-up. Every. Single. Time. iDisk makes me cuss and I don’t trust it (based on experience).
- Versions. I deleted something the other day from Dropbox that I shouldn’t have. Oh wait—no I didn’t. Dropbox had a nice “restore” button happily greeting me and welcoming me back to sanity. Alternatively, iDisk announced to me today (via a fit of archaic error codes) that I could not even delete a file that I WANTED to delete. So that was fun.
- Sharing. Interesting that although you control the entirety of the operating system and the MobileMe experience that supposedly integrates with it, you still can’t quite manage to make, oh say, sharing a file with a friend, easy to do. I have to go online, log in, go find that file, hit the “Share File…” button and hope. Dropbox version: right-click, “copy public link…” This is getting laughable.
- Space. For $100 a year I get 20GB of all of the garbage I’ve been describing with iDisk. For the same $100 I can get 50GB of versioned, scary-fast, easy-to-share, pain-free, I-never-even-think-about-it Dropboxy goodness.
- Speed. Did I mention that yet? Let’s make it perfectly clear: iDisk is slower than shit and Dropbox is faster than shit. So in the Shit category, Dropbox is The.
In closing, I propose two solutions:
- Take a fraction of your mountain of money, and buy Dropbox outright. For any amount they want. (Fine — feel free to apply your gorgeous user-interface to the web app, just don’t mess with how well it works.) Rebrand it as, gee whiz, how about “iDisk?” Continue to offer a free plan. Continue to develop (with your newly acquired Dropbox staff) the Windows and Linux versions. Don’t make it all “Apple-only.” Just replace the backside of iDisk, with Dropbox.
- Make your own damn Dropbox. Just make it as awesome or better than the current one. The only requirement: START OVER.
Sincerely,
Ben Delaney
