I just received my Beta invite to Dropbox, so gave it a try on my Windows XP machine and Mandriva 2008.1

Dropbox

The basic idea of Dropbox is that you can share and synchronise files across the internet between multiple computers, the main selling point being the seamless windows shell (or nautilus) integration that allows you to just drag and drop. As soon as you update a file, it (almost) instantly gets updated on all of your other computers that are linked to your account.

The best way to understand the features of Dropbox is to watch their promotional video.

For a piece of Beta software it works quite well, I usually uncheck any boxes while installing software that wants to integrate with the windows shell because it usually just provides lots of problems. But this hasn’t crashed yet!

Once you’ve installed it you get a Dropbox folder placed in your “My Documents”, anything you place in here will be automatically uploaded and downloaded to any linked computers. The really nifty part is that every time you modify a file, it gets saved to Dropbox and these file revisions don’t count towards your 2GB storage limit. From the web interface you can view and restore old revisions. The web interface also allows you to upload and download files.

Ok, what sucks about Dropbox?

Microsoft Office

If, like me (and everyone else :p) you keep a word document open while working on it for a fairly long time then Dropbox won’t be able to synchronise it. MS office keeps a lock on the file and the auto-saves while it is open, for Dropbox to synchronise it you need to close the file.

Luckily they will be implementing a work-around for this in the future.

Windows Client

This could be good or bad depending on your viewpoint; The windows client doesn’t contain a Settings/Preferences panel.

Windows XP Dropbox taskbar

The Linux client allows you to modify your prefrences.

Linux Dropbox Prefrences

Linux Dropbox Prefrences

Nautilus

There is no support for Konqurer, only Nautilus which doesn’t fit so well if you use KDE but it is still usable as it’s possible to drag and drop from Konqurer to nautilus or use the command line. Or even just use Konqurer, it works almost the same but without the status icons and right-click menu.

For Beta software it works very well; it’s incredibly easy to use and the web-interface is very clean and simple.

Beta Invites

If you want to try it, leave a comment after this post (remember to include email address) and I will send an invite (5 to give away). Grab one while you can because when the software is out of Beta and released to the public Beta users will be given extra free storage.

1. After the Beta period, is Dropbox going to continue to be free to use?We haven’t fully determined a pricing structure yet, but the high level plan at this point is:
   • Free accounts (on the order of 1GB of space)
   • Paid accounts (likely different tiers of space allotment)
   • Beta users will keep their accounts (with more storage than the free accounts) after launch

From the Dropbox FAQ

The latest version of Sun VirtualBox is out now, the most notable addition:

64 bits guest support (64 bits host only)

Aside from this, it looks like mainly bugfixes and lots of minor improvements. Upgrading my windows host was trouble free, updating guest additions was almost trouble free; Mandriva wouldn’t auto-mount the virtual CD image, and I couldn’t manually mount it so I just resorted to downloading the .iso from here.

So take a look at the Changelog yourself and download the latest version.

Picasa 3 now includes Facial recognition, so you can filter your photos to show which include faces. From a quick test, it seems quite good however it doesn’t seem to work too well if the face isn’t full frontal.

In Picasa 3, if you click the face icon, it will display all photos containing faces.

Google Picasa Face Recognition

For those in the US, get it here

For everyone else, grab it here

Find out about other changes here at google groups.

Google Chrome, google’s web browser just entered public BETA.

Google Chrome screenshot

First impressions

It’s Minimal, no status bar, no File menubar, and no title bar (when in fullscreen mode).

It seems fairly snappy, intuitive; you can drag tabs and they will become new windows, re-arrange tab order.  I don’t see the Home button, but the default Home page is very nice; it lists your most visited URLs (with thumbnail images), your recently bookmarked URLs, and recently closed tabs. I don’t know if there’s a way to modify the page, but having a google search box on it would make it the perfect homepage.

If you mistype a URL TLD, it will take you to google and automatically search for what you typed in, quite handy I guess, but just reminds you it’s google’s browser and will be tightly integrated with their services. I doubt there will be any ad-blocking in google chrome!

What is VirtualBox?

Sun’s VirtalBox is a virtualisation application similar to VMware workstation that allows you to run an operating system inside a virtual environment. So you can run a virtual instance of Linux on your windows desktop, which is great for development or maybe you just want to experiment with a new operating system without risk of wiping your main OS.

What makes VirtualBox different from VMware?

1. It’s Free

What more can I say? You can’t beat free, and the only other comparable free virtualisation software is VMware server which is quite good, but not ideal for the desktop, VMware player which lacks the fancy control panel, QEMU which I have not used for a while but was slightly complicated to set up, and Virtual PC which is just OK.

2. Seamless desktop integeration

Imagine running Windows XP and Linux applications side-by-side on your desktop! Well, that’s what they are aiming for and I think it’s a fantastic idea but not quite there yet. The basic idea is that the desktop of the guest OS is transparent and the taskbar is placed on top of the host OS. On a windows host, you must have the guest OS taskbar on the bottom, which is not that great, ideally you would want windows at the bottom and the guest OS taskbar at the top. This doesn’t work because all of the windows in your guest OS are treated as one window in your taskbar. i.e. You’re just running virtualbox, but with an invisible desktop background, but it’s resized itself to sit above your windows taskbar.

I’ve seen screenshots of people running Gnome on a Ubuntu host, and windows as a guest with one taskbar on the top and one on bottom of the screen, a Linux host probably provides more flexibility.

Virtualbox seamless desktop (obligatory random piece of code and lots of windows)

3. Mouse Integration

With VMware you must activate the guest window before the mouse and keyboard inputs are registered, virtualbox can automatically grab the mouse when you move over the guest desktop and will release when you move off the virtualbox window. This feature can also be disabled if you prefer. This feature really makes it effortless to use two operating systems side-by-side.

4. Auto resize of the guest display.

To resize your Guest desktop, you merely resize your virtualbox window on the host, and the guest display is resized automatically. A great idea, because sometimes you don’t want to run fullscreen on your guest OS, and having to scroll to reach the taskbar gets annoying, you can instantly set the desktop to the size you want.

Here’s a screenshot of a mini desktop:

Virtualbox Mandriva desktop

Summary

From using it, I’ve noticed that it is much faster at resuming a paused machine than VMware is, it’s just as easy to use as VMware workstation, has most of the features you need, it supports intel-VT but does not support SMP. Overall, this is a great piece of software.

I hardly ever use the menubar in Firefox since it’s possible to bookmark from the URL bar, so why do I need the menubar wasting 21 pixels?

Hide Menubar can save those precious pixels!

Before

After

The best bit is, If you ever need the menubar, just hit the ALT key and it will reveal it.

Go get it

Kaspersky 2009 adds a new user interface and also some new features.  A full list of changes can be found here, some worth noting are:

1. Graphs - KIS now shows some attractive graphs to highlight network usage and how many objects are currently being scanned. A great addition, nolonger need you spend a few minutes locating the correct logfile to see what KIS is doing.

Kaspersky Updating

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