Saturday, February 14, 2015

Working in the Cloud


I have this great Andoid Phone. It is an Alcatel Pop C7. Fast processor, large screen and very reasonable camera. So it is a kind of workhorse for me. I use the camera a lot. Well it is obviously more convenient to carry your phone with you every day instead of your digital cam. But that is not the only application. I use Be ON Road as my daily navigation system. It is an off-line navigation system that uses Open Streetmap maps. So no wifi or data connection needed and the app is free. And now I am busy to write my own apps using app-inventor.

I use this phone for all kinds of things like photocamera (in fact most off my pics on this weblog are made with the phone), mp3 player, navigation system, barcode and qrcode scanner, calculator, for making notes, 3d video player (watch this space), winemaking tool (with my own app whatch this space inn the future). etc etc. However, I do not use it for what it was meant for: communucation. I almost never make calls with it, I do not SMS. I do not have accounts for facebook, twitter or whatsapp or any other social media. I simply do not do those kind of things.

For those of you who do not want a mobile phone consider this: you do not need to put a phone card in it. You can use it as a powerfull portable computer with bluetooth and wifi and you never have to tell anyone that you have a mobile phone....

But there is a small inconvenience. It is no longer possible to connect your android device with an USB-cable to your computer system without any extra apps. So I was looking for a good solution for this. And I found it by working in the cloud.




I went to the website of copy.com They offer for free 10Gig which you can use on any device (Linux, Android, Windows, Mac). So anything stored on the servers of copy.com is available on all your devices.

Install a small program on your windows machine and A new map will be made and put on your desktop:

 
Now install the android app which you can find by clicking here and you are ready to share files between your phone, tablet and PC. So now when I take pictures with my Phone I cam immediately upload them to copy.com and they will be directly available (well after a few minutes that is) on my PC. Firstly that feels safe. I can now upload my photo's from any place in the world to the cloud and they are available at my home system. Ohh naturally you can make an open map to which you can grant other access so they can see your work from any other place in the world almost instantly.And secondly it is a lot less hassle. Here is the android screen:

The up-arrow is used to up-load your files to the copy.com server. If you put anything from your home desktop system in your copy folder in your windows system it will be almost instantly available to your android system.

This way I also upload test programs to my phone which I made with App-Inventor. Great for private testing.

And guess what. There are more cloud based storage facilities you can use. There is Google drive which offers you 15Gig and Dropbox. By using all three you will have about 30gig available.......


Have fun

Luc