CloudApp Blog

Privacy Settings

2010-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

CloudApp was designed for rapid file sharing with the world (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and excels with its simplicity. It is a joy to share files with your Twitter followers and friends; simply drag a file to the menubar icon and we provide you with a really short link.

When a business like CloudApp and the community around it grows, privacy becomes a top priority. We need to address a few issues that were brought to our attention:

By uploading a file to CloudApp you are uploading it to the internet without password protection. Anyone who visits the link of your upload can access the data you shared (that’s what it was made for and why you love it, right?). Even though there are no public records of your links and it is very unlikely that someone will guess the link to your upload, it is possible.

We strongly advise you to restrain from uploading confidential data such as credit card information, legal documents or super secret Delta Force mission plans. If you did not think twice before uploading files to CloudApp we recommend trashing the files in question through the web interface.

How can we solve this problem? By adding a feature called private uploads. As soon as we were notified by one of our users (Sunday, May 09th) about this privacy issue we started working on a solution.

CloudApp just works because it is simple. Adding complexity to the application is something we try to avoid as much as possible. We could ask for a password for every private upload and have you confirm it with several dialogue boxes but that doesn’t sound like fun. Instead we opted for a simpler solution. You can now create public and private links:

Public

Public links (http://cl.ly/137X) have short URLs that are great for sharing with friends on Twitter.

Private

Private links (http://cl.ly/0b95b0851cc5a723c2cc) have a 20 digit randomly generated code (think of it as a password to access your upload).

Because we take privacy serious, by default from now on all uploads will be private (long URLs). If you wish to change this setting simply visit the Settings tab in the web app. Regardless of your default setting you can toggle the privacy status of each upload individually.

Even with this added security measure please don’t upload information containing highly sensitive information to CloudApp. While we can keep your data safe, we do not provide the necessary security to store information like credit card numbers or missile guidance codes.

Does this mean you shouldn’t upload artwork, music or files no one is supposed to see? Absolutely not, those files are safe as long as you flag them as private.

Too Easy To Delete

2010-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

The menubar drop-down is the most important part of CloudApp’s user interface. It is the central hub of all interactions with CloudApp. Coming up with a simple and intuitive concept for this use case isn’t easy.

We implemented deletion by hovering over the icon in the upload history and clicking on the delete button. It seemed like a great idea to us, but it really isn’t. Most users didn’t expect this kind of behavior and accidentally deleted their uploads (we released a Trash and the ability to recover deleted items last week).

CloudApp 1.0.2 features an improved drop-down that will make accidentally deleted files less likely. When hovering over an icon you will now be presented with a clipboard icon—clicking will copy the short URL of the upload back to your clipboard—instead of a glyph invoking deletion.

So how do I delete? After giving it some thought, we realized that fast access to deletion is not as important as preventing unintended results. Pressing the alt-key while browsing the history in the drop-down will now turn the file-type icons into delete icons. A simple click and the selected upload is moved to the Trash.

This update also includes several other bug fixes:

Reverted to copying raw URL (not the title) to clipboard
Fixed input method switch freeze
Fixed Asian input method freeze
Fixed 10.5.8 startup crasher

The update is available through the CloudApp preferences or as a direct download. We are now actively developing CloudApp 1.1 to address all known bugs, memory leaks, and the Raindrop API.

Downtime Explained

2010-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

On April 25th, the servers powering CloudApp went offline. Thanks to some amazing work by Heroku, no data was lost. We would like to explain what went wrong and what precautions we took to avoid similar situations in the future.

CloudApp is powered by Heroku and Amazon S3. How exactly does this work? When you upload a file to CloudApp, you are actually uploading directly to Amazon’s servers (you can read the technical details if that interests you). S3 stores your data redundantly and is wicked fast. After the upload is complete, our servers on Heroku assign it a short URL and catalog it in the database.

During the recent service outage your files were safely stored away. The downtime was caused by a hardware failure on one of the Heroku servers. Without them, CloudApp cannot associate the files on Amazon S3 with the short URL database.

After immediate contact with Heroku, they offered to spin up new servers for us and have CloudApp running within minutes of downtime. The downside was this would have meant restoring from a 24 hour old backup. Losing data is the worst possible option so we opted to wait until their efforts to recover the data on the failed drives was complete. This turned out to be a good gamble as the data was recovered.

To avoid outages in the future (and faster recuperation), we have upgraded to a dedicated database with guaranteed resources for CloudApp and turned our daily database backup into an hourly backup.

CloudApp was originally running on Heroku’s high-performance shared database cluster which works well until another customer requires more resources. Our fast response times are highly dependent on a fast database so the upgrade was an obvious choice. After the upgrade, CloudApp is running like a dream. We’ve barely seen any spikes in response time and the new database is screaming fast with the added bonus of knowing we have a stable infrastructure.

On the plus side, we tried to make the best out of a bad situation and used the outage to deploy two highly requested features and a few bug fixes.

Changes

Rename files via the web interface by clicking on the title of an item. Once you are happy with the new title simply hit enter or cancel with esc.
Added a Trash to recover deleted items. In the web interface, select Trash from the left menu, find the file you would like to restore, hover over the icon, and click the restore button.
As mentioned above, database backups are now run hourly.
Names of bookmarks created through the web app default to the URL.
Item names are truncated to 255 characters instead of throwing an exception.
Fixed font rendering in Mobile Safari.
API: Set item_type to “bookmark” for bookmarks.
API: href attribute uses the my.cl.ly subdomain always.
API: Following the redirect after uploading a file returns the JSON of the newly created item.

We’re still experimenting with the interface for editing, deleting, and restoring items but we wanted to get these features out to you now even though we’re not completely happy with the UI.

As always, let us know what you think either by sending us a message on Twitter or using our support forums.

Changes Under The Hood

2010-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been an exciting 3 weeks since we’ve launched. The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive and all it takes is a simple Twitter search to see you’re using and loving CloudApp. We released some basic documentation on our REST API and we already have a PHP wrapper released and a Perl module and Linux client in the works.

We’re doing our best to keep up with support requests and reply to you on Twitter (CoTweet has made this possible) but we know we can do better. In the coming weeks and months we’ll become much more organized to keep up with demand. One of those efforts that I feel strongly about is keeping everyone up to date on what we’ve done by posting frequent changelogs. I love to peek at a project’s changelog—both open and closed source—to get a feel for how active the project is. I doubt I’m alone.

Without further ado, here’s a short list of mostly bug fixes we’ve pushed out since April 1st.

Changing your email would prevent you from logging in to the desktop client.
Email addresses are no longer case sensitive.
There was a very slow memory leak that would cause the app server to restart about once per day. We switched from MRI 1.9.1 to REE 1.8.7 and all appears to be well. The root cause has yet to be tracked down.
RTF files are recognized as text files.
Bookmarks are no longer cached which prevented visits from being counted.
The characters ”+” and ”?” are correctly escaped in file names.
The code to generate a short, random, unique URL for items has gone through a few incarnations. A few of the previous versions would occasionally fail and uploading a file or creating a bookmark would result in a generic “Bad Server Response” error.

A Crystal Ball

2010-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

During the beta we tried to keep everything under the radar and were extremely secretive about CloudApp, its features, and the future. We came to the conclusion that there is really no point. We want to build a community around CloudApp, and this is impossible without sharing.

We have received a ton of feature requests and really like some of the ideas. Unfortunately, there is still a lot going on in the background that we need to optimize before we can work on them.

We are building a small website inspired by Cultured Code’s status board so we can keep you in the loop. In the meantime here is a rough roadmap for the next months:

At the moment we are working on getting downtime close to zero. The Heroku staff and our developers are doing a great job and I’m confident that by the end of the month this will be the case.

The next priority is business related. Although some companies out there are waiting for the big buy out and don’t seem to care about a decent business model, we believe in the basic principles of capitalism. We are integrating our payment gateway so we can process payments for Pro accounts as well as our ad server for free accounts.

While CloudApp is a useful app as it is, we are planning to take it to the next level with powerful Raindrops and incredible extensibility. For this, part of the CloudApp core has to be re-written. To give you an example: we want to turn each Raindrop into its own process. Think about Webkit 2 or Google Chrome: each tab is its own process so even if you crash a single process nothing happens to the rest. We are also moving the Finder and Screenshot support out of the core and into Raindrops along with our own Screenshot engine. Developers will be able to include Raindrops in their own apps and CloudApp can automatically detect and take advantage of them.

Over all we will also improve the first launch impression, in-app registration and documentation.

As you may have noticed our blog doesn’t have a comment form. We think Twitter is better for instant feedback so let us know about two things: Would you like us to blog about tech and server related topics? What about business and startup topics? Writing is impersonal and we want to get to know you past your avatars. If you feel like it, record a YouTube video and let us know how CloudApp has improved your workflow (keep in mind that we might share it with our users).

The Release

2010-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

Finally. After all it wasn’t an April Fools joke and we really did launch on April 1st. It has been an incredible start so far and we can’t thank you guys enough for making this possible.

Within the first 5 days we have surpassed the goals we had set for our first month, met some extremely talented people wanting to work with us and managed to keep the servers up and running (excluding two minor outages) despite the huge demand. All in all, we are proud of our users and of ourselves.

There is no time to sit back and relax. We have a lot of improvements to make, features to add and scaling issues to fight.

The first thing on our list are Pro accounts. We initially wanted to announce pricing and specifics this week but the way you are using CloudApp differs greatly from the private beta and any other application out there so we think it is only fair to wait until the end of the month to see what we can really give away. We wouldn’t want you to be disappointed.

However the most important reason we are waiting until May 1st to launch Pro accounts is because we want to make sure the system is running as smooth as possible. Although you can prepare for scaling issues you don’t always get it right in a simulation. We never expected this high demand so please be patient with us until the end of the month.

Pro accounts will have the option to use custom domains for your links and allow bigger file sizes to be uploaded (currently the limit is set at 50MB).

We are publishing the REST API for CloudApp today (we will announce it on Twitter) and have been talking to our favorite Mac and web developers to integrate their software with ours. We will be working on getting CloudApp into your favorite Twitter clients, Mac clients and other great gadgets. Something dear to our hearts is a good integration of CloudApp into content management systems like Wordpress and Expression Engine so look out for that as well.

Update: The REST API is now available for everyone.

The first app that is already using our API is Zootool. You can easily capture CloudApp uploads with the Lasso and add them to your Zoo. Make sure to check it out, it is an absolutely brilliant tool.

The iPhone uploader is ready for submission (we are just waiting for some paperwork) and we will Open Source it on Github so you can check out how easy it is to integrate CloudApp into your application. Some people have asked us to sell the iPhone application but we think it is in everyone’s interest if we get as many tools out there to use CloudApp and what better way than to provide 1st party code.

We believe in our product and think it has room to grow into something extremely useful. Nevertheless this depends on the community behind it. Support is one of the most important aspects of software development and we really want to know how you use and like CloudApp. If there is ever anything we can do for you just stop by Twitter or the support forums and let us know. We want you to be as much part of the CloudApp experience as we are. Just ask.

CloudApp Coming On April 1st

2010-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

So, it looks like we are back (this time for good). We promised you an application that makes sharing files with your co-workers and friends super easy. Well its coming. We are releasing CloudApp on April 1st.

Before getting into details I’d like to thank all the beta testers and apologize for the scarce communication on our part. A lot has changed during the last months.

I guess the biggest step was for our team to quit their jobs and stop freelancing to join Linebreak full time. We are officially a corporation now—you know—with all the fancy paperwork.

Bureaucracy aside, we quickly realized that CloudApp would not scale fast enough if it had to. In a private beta with roughly 1500 testers, our servers were having trouble with the load. Probably not the best starting point for an anticipated app.

What did we do? Start from scratch. Larry Marburger joined our team and we rewrote the entire web app, API and Cocoa client. Totally worth it.

Since you most likely don’t really care about anything other than facts about CloudApp here is the gist of it:

Some time next week we are opening up the developer section so you can check out the API’s and start integrating CloudApp into your own applications (if you are a developer - duh). We are releasing CloudApp to everyone on April 1st (this has absolutely nothing to do with April Fools’ Day) and are really looking forward to your feedback.

One more thing: don’t worry about pricing and storage.