There’s Google Drive and Dropbox and iCloud for storing your personal files, and CloudApp and Droplr for drop-dead simple file sharing from your menubar. But just when those seemed like enough, Minbox took the world by storm several months ago by privately sending files of any size instantly to your colleagues.
It turns out that even that isn’t enough. The brand-new Cloudup — an online file-sharing service that our Web.Appstorm review called a slick and elegant file-sharing service — has raised the bar with its Mac app. It’s the best of Droplr’s menubar file sharing with Minbox’ approach of instantly sharing without waiting for the upload to finish, combined with an intuitive way to share multiple files at once. For a beta app, it’s giving the existing simple file sharing tools a run for their money.
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Simplifying the Simplest Thing
A faintly iOS 7-styled file sharing app
We’d be readily inclined to think that you couldn’t improve on CloudApp and Droplr’s model: drag a file to your menubar, and as soon as its uploaded the app will copy the link to said file so you can paste it in any app and share it however you want — in an email or on your social networks. Minbox, for all its hype, didn’t improve on that model, since it’s only for private file sharing over email.
Cloudup, on the other hand, takes the best of both ideas and makes it even better. You drag a file or a set of files to the menubar app (that thankfully doesn’t use a cloud icon), and it’ll instantly copy a link to your clipboard that you can go ahead and share while the files are still uploading. They’ll likely be uploaded by the time you’ve shared the link, but if not, your recipients will see a loading progress in their browsers and can see the files in full as soon as they’re uploaded. Since it allows uploads up to 200Mb each, you’ll save quite a bit of time by being able to instantly share the link to your file rather than waiting to share it when it’s finished uploading. Almost every file format will show as an online preview automatically in Cloudup, and you can add a + to the end of the URL to directly access the file itself, just as in Droplr.
Sharing a set of files in Cloudup
It really shines when you’re sharing multiple files together. You can drag-and-drop multiple files to the Cloudup menubar app to upload them as a set, and the link it’ll copy to your clipboard will be to that set of files. Or, you can upload one file, then open it in your browser and drag-and-drop other files into the page — or click Edit and add URLs to the set, that’ll be added as a screenshot or a text-only article, depending on the link — to add them to the set. Then, you can share the whole set with your colleagues, and they can view the files online, download them individually, or download the whole set.
Tweaking Some Settings
Just give me some settings
By default, Cloudup will upload all of your screenshots automatically, and will open your freshly uploaded files in your browser as soon as they’re uploaded. If you take a lot of screenshots, you might want to turn the first off, and if you only want the URL in your clipboard to share, then you’ll want to turn the second off. Either way, you can get Cloudup to work the way you want through its very simple interface. It’s every bit as simple as CloudApp or Droplr, but with the added advantage of instant sharing and the option to share multiple files together.
Cloudup is currently in private beta, and lets you share 1000 individual files for free (you can delete older shares to free up shares, if needed). In the near future, they’re planning to add paid accounts so you can share as many files as you want.
Conclusion
A beautiful web app rounds out one of the nicest file sharing tools we’ve seen
If you want a quicker way to share files, you should give Cloudup a try. And, instead of having to wait in line for an invite, you can signup with our special Mac.AppStorm invite code by signing up at https://cloudup.com/s/macappstorm or entering our invite code “macappstorm” through the normal signup form.
Give it a try, and let us know what you think. We happen to think it just might be the file sharing tool that jumpstarts innovation in the über-simple file sharing tool sphere.
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