5 Things in My Dropbox
Dropbox is a service/application that lets you sync files, folders or whatever with an online server and, by extension, between your Macs. In my estimation, it’s one of the greatest inventions of all time. Amazingly, it’s free.
Dropbox is becoming more popular and they have an excellent video tutorial up at their site that explains the fundamentals of the program, so I’m not going to waste words here describing how it works. Instead, I’ll talk about five things that I keep synced between my two Macs with the help of Dropbox. I hope it gives you some ideas.
My AppleScripts
As far as I’m concerned, any action that requires more than a total of two mouse clicks and will be done more than once is a good candidate for an AppleScript. Many of my scripts are no more than an few lines long. But even such a small amount of code, when run repeatedly via a keystroke over a long period, will rescue a significant portion of my life from the doldrums of repetitive drudgery. I use FastScripts to run my scripts.
My TextExpander Snippets
What AppleScript is for repetitive tasks, TextExpander is for repetitive typing. I recently wrote about how to use TextExpander to perform custom searches from Safari’s location bar and since then I’ve become completely addicted to the method. In the past I’ve used TextExpander primarily when developing new websites, but these custom URL searches have suddenly made TE more important to me than every before.
My 1Password Keychain
The web is a dangerous place I’m told. 1Password keeps you a little bit safer by allowing you to create crazy strong and unique logins for every site you visit and save them in its custom 1Password keychain. The only problem with this solution is that if you’re ever on a computer without 1Password, you’re pretty much out of luck for logging in anywhere. By keeping 1Password in sync across your Macs, you remove this obstacle. Unless, that is, you’re forced to use a PC at work, in which case you’re out of luck.
My TaskPaper To Dos
If you work on multiple Macs, having your To Dos synced across machines is a no brainer. As I’ve written, I use HogBay Software’s dead simple TaskPaper to keep track of my pending chores and sudden inspirations, and while I do very much like the uncluttered and themable UI, the main reason I love the application is the plain text format in which it stores your notes. Total portability and compatibility with any app that can read .txt. It’s pure convenience.
My MarsEdit Drafts Folder and Preferences
Though I use TextEdit for the majority of my writing needs, I turn to MarsEdit when it’s time to add some markup and images to my words before sending them up to the web. MarsEdit allows you to store local drafts of your posts and see exactly how they will look on your site even without an internet connection. Keeping all my drafts as well as my custom macros synced up between Macs really is a necessity for me.
Your Dropbox
This is of course my personal list of files and folders that I sync using Dropbox, and you likely have a very different set of apps which are critical to what you do on your computer. So in that case, are you a Dropbox user? Has it improved your life like it has mine? Doing something interesting with it? If so, let us know about it in the comments. And if not, hopefully this article has given you some ideas.
