(personal workflow) (dropbox, evernote, box, mac) (oversing thoughts) In Oversin

(personal workflow) (dropbox, evernote, box, mac) (oversing thoughts)

In Oversing, We need to rely on either our own storage technology (as does Slack – which is just Amazon), or use one of Evernote, Box, or Dropbox’s technologies.

So today I’m working through integrating Evernote into Oversing (or Oversing into Evernote) and as part of the research, I”m going through the new Dropbox apps today. (I am biased toward Evernote because of a similar design philosophy)

I use Mac “Notes” for quick ideas, notes, reminders and my to-do list. I write long pieces in Evernote’s Web UI, (which is still the best text editor I have found). And for very long pieces and complex work I use Textwrangler. And for business stuff I use Word. Everything is always stored ‘somewhere’.

For backup and file storage across devices, I use Dropbox. I don’t need any user interfaces other than the one’s I have in the operating system. I put everything I could ever want to save under the dropbox folder, treating it as ‘~/documents’. I don’t use the ~/documents folder, I have changed the default screenshot directory in osx to point to a new directory ~/screenshots to save on performance and desktop clutter. And I have folder shortcuts on my doc so that I can drag items to certain folders without using the Finder app. Also, I do NOT back up my ~/downloads folder, and I clean it every now and then.

So when I go through the dropbox addins I just don’t sort of get why you need them. Very transparent technology.

Box on the other hand has taken the enterprise route by providing security and permissions that Dropbox and Evernote dont’

So you sort of have this hierarchy (which I’m sure most people understand) of Evernote (personal) -> Dropbox (Professional) -> Box (enterprise).

Unfortunately, the only viable price alternative is to do it ourselves. And that seems a shame. The cost of enterprise applications is not so much the data and servicing the data, but the costs of storage of large volumes of work related files. So you sort of have to price as such. One of the tricks is to only store small things and then send the user to Dropbox/Box/Google account for large file storage but that doesn’t work for IP related work which we have to guarantee providence over, and which must be subject to audits.

Argh.