There are quite a few similar services around, but Cloud is the latest of the instant file sharing apps, and it’s very nicely done.
The aim is to make sharing of files – any files – as quick and painless as possible. Whatever you wish you share, you drag up to the icon in your Menu Bar. The app does everything from there; uploading the file, creating a short URL for it, and putting that URL on your clipboard. All you need to do is paste it somewhere.
Cloud is still very young. It was only officially out of beta on April 1st, and there are still some rough edges. What I like about it is that the dev team are very open about what’s going on, as you can see from posts like this one on their blog.
Right now, Cloud is free, but plans are afoot for a paid Pro version. Getting started with Cloud is a little more complex than perhaps it needs to be – sign up, wait for an email code, click it, sign in, download the app, enter your login details – but in use, everything’s as simple as you’d expect.
Cloud is built with plugins in mind, and comes with a bunch built-in. They’re called “Raindrops” in Cloudspeak, and the default ones include actions for uploading selected songs in iTunes, or selected photos in iPhoto, or shortening the URL of the frontmost Safari window (which isn’t quite file sharing, but Cloud has its own short URL domain at cl.ly so you can see why they’re doing it), and some others. More are available to download once you’ve installed the app.
Cloud is nice but I’m not sure it’s for me. I already have a Dropbox account with a public folder, so sharing anything using that is pretty simple already (though it does require a few more clicks). If you frequently need to share stuff with others as fast as possible, Cloud may well be useful for you.
As always, I’d love to know what you think.
