Lewis,
A couple of notes from my own experience:
First, a disclaimer about my own digital knowledge. I'm fairly competent with computers, having worked with them daily for 35 years or so -- a friend & colleague at the time introduced us to the original Apple Macintosh. His first words were: "This is a computer. The on/off switch is round the back, here.
Don't touch it. You will touch it only
after you take your cup of coffee from your desk, and put it here, on your bookshelf, just out of arm's length. You do not want to see what hot coffee does to a keyboards." (We're still friends -- he and his wife are avid cyclists & canoeists.) I have very limited patience with a lot of the hardware & software I've encountered over the years: I treat all this stuff as one more tool, and it better work with a minimum of inconvenience, cost or harm. I despise the e-hype that surrounds us.
Second, then with all my twitches and biases, the best (i.e., most reliable and unobtrusive) file-sharing system I've found is Dropbox. You can find it here:
dropbox.comI learned about Dropbox nearly a decade ago from a friend & colleague in South Africa, who was & is vastly more e-skilled & knowledgeable than I am. We were using some Google docs, esp but not only Calendar, to plan a joint work project across 16,000 kms. Shortly into our project, all the Google stuff disappeared. (It reappeared only six months later, after we'd finished the project. I was not amused.) What to do?? Daniel suggested Dropbox, and it worked faultlessly. We used it for text docs and spreadsheets.
Nowadays, I use Dropbox mainly for sharing photos. I keep my original photos on my computer's hard drive, hence on my backup drive as well. (I use a Macbook Pro laptop and a Lacie backup drive.) To edit photos, I just use the Mac iPhoto software -- it's OK for my purposes.
A couple of advantages which I've found with Dropbox:
> You can get up to 5 GB of storage free of charge. (Check that if you look at the site.) I've found that's more than enough for my requirements. This capacity lets me post high-resolution photos which viewers with editing privileges can download & play with. (In contrast, I found that photos posted on Picasa, for example, were radically reduced in size/clarity, and hence not suitable for printing.)
> Your Dropbox files are stored in two places: on the cloud (wherever that is)
and in your own hard drive. With stuff on your hard drive, you can add, change, download, etc., whether you have internet connectivity or not. (Or maybe your internet connection never goes phhhhzzzttt? Nice work if you can get it.) After creating, editing, or dumping files offline, your online Dropbox folders/files are synched with your hard drive versions when you go online. If you make changes in the web-based docs, their hard-drive counterparts are synched as well.
One disadvantage I've found, is that I can't post photos from Dropbox
within my text on the Thorn Forum. Perhaps this is because my photos on Dropbox are too bulky 'cos they're hi-res?--maybe. In any case, I post any photos below my text, four at a time, after reducing them to about 500KB.
Hope that's useful, Lewis. Good luck with it all, in any case.
John
