Since the emergence of Dropbox, many cloud services have spawned all over the internet, and you probably use a few or all of them. From desktops and video games in the cloud to file-sharing, file-syncing cloud services, you are bound to have a membership to at least one – even if you didn’t intend to.
That isn’t a bad thing, though. As many of you may know, cloud services are extremely useful for school, work, or personal use, not to mention that the cloud will most likely be our future. Because of this, today we will cover the top cloud services and some applications that support them.
iCloud
iCloud, Apple’s venture into the cloud realm, is relatively new, but a lot of people use it (especially if you have an iPhone). Even though iCloud is somewhat new, there are quite a few apps that support it.
iA Writer
iA Writer is one of the coolest text editors available for the Mac, and as many of you may know, it supports iCloud. Paired with the iPhone and iPad versions, you can focus on your writing wherever you go. Check out our review here.
Todo
Todo is a relatively simple task manager for OS X and iOS. It has plenty of cool features and settings to play around with. With the reception of the OS X Reminders app, apps like this one are not needed as much. In any case, Todo support iCloud syncing as well as Dropbox, so give it a try.
Memo
Memo is an extremely simple sticky-note-like app that is available for OS X, and iOS. It syncs all your stickies with iCloud, so you will always have your little notes across all your devices.
Day One
Need to keep a journal of your life? Want it all to be tightly organized and synced with all your devices? Check out Day One. We gave it a nine out of 10, so you should give it a try. It supports both iCloud and Dropbox, so you can’t go wrong with this one.
PDF Pen
PDFpen is an awesome PDF editor developed by the guys who brought you Textexpander. With PDFpen, you can edit text, add images, signatures, and more text to your PDFs. It also supports iCloud so you can access your files through the iPad version of PDFpen.
Coda 2
Coda has been good to many of us, and when Coda 2 was announced, everyone was excited. When it was released though, it was received with mixed feelings. Whether you are team Coda or team SublimeText, you will probably enjoy Coda 2′s iCloud support. It syncs up your clips across all your Macs (this feature is only available to Mac-App-Store-bought copies). You can also give Diet Coda a try.
Plain Cloud
Plain Cloud was brought up recently to our app-craving eyes. If you want to know what you have in your iCloud folder and don’t want to deal with digging through weird folder or file names, give it a try.
Napkin
Napkin is a rather cool app that let’s you create visual notes. With plenty of features and settings, you have a nice app here. Check out our review if you need to. It supports iCloud, to sync up, so you are covered in the cloud front.
Clipboard iCloud Apps
Clipboard apps. Yeah, they are very helpful when you want to move links around and across all your devices with ease. We could have featured all three here, but here is a nice little app showdown we had a while back that you should check out.
Pocket Planes
Pocket Planes is a casual “airline sim” where you manage and grow your fleet of planes. While there are other iCloud-enabled games, this one uses iCloud the best. It does pretty much what PlayStation Plus’ cloud saves does for the PS3 and the PSP (or Nintendo Wii U with the 3DS, but, you know, simpler.
WatchCam
WatchCam is a surveillance application that detects motion and records video automatically. The videos recorded by the app are uploaded to iCloud, so if someone is trying to steal your computer, you will be able to see the videos on your iOS device via WatchCam’s app.
OS X Mountain Lion iCloud-supported Apps
You probably already know this, but in case you don’t, we will highlight the applications that you already have installed on your Mac that support iCloud. iTunes, Safari, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, Mail, Notes, TextEdit, all support iCloud in some way and you can find their iOS counter parts already installed on your iOS devices as well.
Dropbox
Dropbox is the little start-up that took off and never looked back. Dropbox is probably the service everyone uses and what every other service in this roundup tried to copy. As such, many apps have backed it up by adding support for Dropbox.
DropLink
DropLink – interestingly hosted on Dropbox – is a simple app that allows you to sync up any file or folder on your Mac with Dropbox. Pretty simple. Just give it a try and if you don’t want popups, consider giving the creator a donation.
MacDropAny
MacDropAny is like DropLink, but it syncs up any folder or file on your Mac with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, iCloudrive, and SkyDrive. So you are pretty covered when it comes to cloud services.
TextExpander
You saw this one coming. TextExpander is one of the coolest productivity tools around, and since version four, TextExpander supports Dropbox sync. So, go on, take your snippets to the cloud.
1Password
Another favorite app of ours is 1Password. 1Password supports over-the-air sync as well as Dropbox sync and backup. So if you want to access all your passwords from all your devices you can’t go wrong with 1Password – and even then, you can’t go wrong with 1Password.
Notesdeck
Available for Mac, iPhone and iPad, Notesdeck is a nice app that gives you access to your Simplenote, Evernote, and Dropbox files easily. Of course, Dropbox isn’t a note-taking service, but you know it can be used as one, so have at it, if you aren’t already.
CloudJot
This is another clean and useful note-taking app that allows you to take notes easily and sync them up with Dropbox. It will always hangout on the side of your screen, so getting to it is extremely easy.
Servus
Servus is a menubar icon that’ll create a branded download page to whatever you drop into it. It will zip the folder or file up for you, too, and copy the link to your clipboard. Talk about a nice way to present your downloads, right?
Notational
Notational is a cool app that stores and retrieves notes from all your other note-taking apps like Simplenote, Dropbox, PlainText, Elements, iA Writer, and other iOS applications. It has many nice features, so give it a try.
Scrivener 2
Scrivener 2 (for OS X and Windows) is an application that gives writers of complex documents the ability to structure and compose their pieces with maximum control. Scrivener 2 can sync up to Simplenote, Index Card and apps that use Dropbox like Notebooks, and PlainText.
Dropln
Fast sharing, smart filtering, and file previewing is what Dropln is all about. If you are looking to streamline the way you use Dropbox, you might want to try this one out.
GrabBox
Want to share screenshots easily? Check out GrabBox. It reacts to the screenshots you take and atomically copies them to your Dropbox Public folder as it gives your clipboard the URL. You are now set.
Box
Geared towards that enterprising young go-getter, Box is probably not your first choice when it comes to cloud services, – you know, with names like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft backing the other options – but it is certainly a good structured service. Not many apps for it on the Mac, though.
Box Sync for Mac
If you are not very familiar with Box, we added this one app because honestly, it is sort of hard to spot. This app is actually Box’s first party app that acts pretty much like Dropbox’s or Google Drive’s official app. It puts a folder on your Mac that you can drag stuff to and upload to your Box account.
Box SimpleShare
SimpleShare is another of Box’s official apps that will allow you to take screenshots and place them in your Box account for easy sharing. You can also use this app to add files to Box and share them with ease.
Google Drive
Odd that Google came to the party a bit late, right? Either way, Google Drive is solid, but honestly, it is better used with web apps than desktop apps. The official Google Drive app isn’t great either. But, hey, here are some cool apps that allow you to use your Google Drive service.
Insync
Insync is another great way to use Google Drive on your Mac. This small, yet powerful app is great for sharing, editing, and using multiple Google accounts. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices, so you are more than set to go. At least until Google gets their stuff together and brings forward a better version of Google Drive – just saying.
Skydrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and so on.
Found
I couldn’t find an Amazon Cloud Drive app for the life of me, so if this one doesn’t support it, it is probably not a horrible thing; however, if you are looking for something that supports Dropbox, Evernote, SkyDrive, and Google Drive, here you go. Found scored an eight out of 10 from us, so give it a try.
BoxCryptor
One more app that supports SkyDrive, but no mention of Amazon Cloud Drive. Maybe they just think Amazon Cloud Drive is too big of a name. In any case, BoxCryptor is an encrypting app that will secure your files as their go up to the cloud. Magic. Yes, please. You can also use this app with Dropbox, Google Drive, and possibly other cloud services.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many applications that support (or exist thanks to) cloud services. There are many apps, web apps, and plugins out there that are unaccounted for in this roundup, so if you have a cool app that supports cloud services, let us know in the comments below!