2 hot cloud apps
January 22, 2012
In our daily working with computers, it’s not uncommon to come across software that provide such obvious benefits that it becomes hard to live without them. Of late, with cloud computing, this has also become the case with web services. Below are some utilities that will make your life simpler:
Use Ifttt to build bridges between different services
We are well-versed with the concept of ‘events’ and ‘responses’ . When a phone rings, we pick it up; if the oven’s timer goes off, we check on our baking. The Web service ‘If This, Then That’ (IFTTT) now brings this concept of events and responses to the internet…
The resource lets you pick from a large number of event sources-e-mail services, social networks, online storage sites, photo sites, RSS feeds, etc-and supports myriad actions and responses that can be carried out automatically in case a certain condition is met.
Take Facebook, for instance. It has a feature that lets people tag you in photos. This means your photo collection will not only contain the pictures you take, but also those in which you are tagged. Now consider the cloud storage service called Dropbox. Using IFTTT, you can set up an "if-then " condition that will automatically store the pictures in which you are tagged to your Dropbox account.
So whether it’s automatically updating your Twitter image when you update your Facebook image, or something more useful as getting an SMS notification of stock/currency rate updates, IFTTT can handle nearly everything.
The resource offers numerous "channels" which can serve as sources of events (most popular web services are included) and also as recipients of actions to be performed. Web site: http:// ifttt.com
Use attachments.me to search within your Gmail attachments
Gmail might have a brilliant search system, but unfortunately, it doesn’t search within your attachments. The creators of Attachments.me understand this need, and have built a system to index the contents of your attachments.
To use the service, create an Attachments.me account by signing up with your existing Google account. It will then begin indexing as many as the last 10,000 messages in your inbox. Once it is done crawling through your email, you will be able to search through them through their web site or even in Gmail itself if you install the add-on (available for Firefox and Chrome).
If you’re bothered about privacy, don’t worry. Attachments .me downloads a copy of your attachments in order to index them, but it stores them in an encrypted form on a secure server – and your account information can only be accessed by you.
Additionally, if you remove your account, Attachments.me deletes all your data from their servers. The only thing they maintain are statistics on the kinds of terms people search for so as to improve their systems. Website: http:// attachments.me