CloudApp Blog

Jolidrive Integration

2013-04-05T00:00:00-04:00

The exceptional folks at Jolicloud have added CloudApp to their cloud management tool Jolidrive. Use Jolidrive to access your content across all the cloud services you use like CloudApp, Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr, and many others. Browse through the pictures and screenshots you’ve shared, watch your videos, and reshare drops.

Gifify

2013-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

This is a guest post from Jonathan Clem. He is a Ruby developer at Heroku and is an avid CloudApp user. Follow him on Twitter and GitHub.

Although I work mere feet from @mschoening (co-founder of CloudApp) and the rest of my team at Heroku, the majority of our work-related communication happens on Campfire. Our conversations are open to commentary and input from anyone interested in the topic at hand, and it’s easy to search through the backlog for a conversation that happened days before.

We are constantly sharing screen captures of features we’re working on, and CloudApp makes it easy to take a screenshot and paste a link into Flint for the team to take a look at. Until recently, however, there wasn’t a particularly easy method of sharing previews of user interaction on Campfire or GitHub. We’d take a screen recording with Quicktime X, but that doesn’t display instantly in Campfire like an image does, nor is it visible in a GitHub issue without clicking a link.

Gifs are a great alternative for showing off little UI interactions, because they show up in Campfire/Flint and GitHub threads without having to click a link. I can scan a conversation and see how an interaction has evolved over time.

ffmpeg does a fine job of converting a screen recording to a gif for pasting into a thread, but it’s not particularly useful to have to memorize this:

ffmpeg -i recording.mov -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 10 recording.gif

…and one still has to upload the resulting file to CloudApp to get a public link.

I decided that it would be nice to have a tool that knew what I wanted to do with these .mov to .gif conversions and just did the whole thing for me. So I created Gifify. Gifify takes a .mov file, converts it into a .gif, uploads it to CloudApp and copies a link to your clipboard.

Given a Quicktime X screen recording called movie.mov, I can convert it to to a gif and upload it to CloudApp with a single command:

gifify movie.mov

As long as I have the CloudApp gem installed, I’ll have a link copied to my clipboard that’s ready to be pasted into Campfire, Flint, GitHub, or anywhere else that supports displaying .gifs:

The original inspiration for creating Gifify came from this post by Richard Schneeman, with additional help from this gist.

Gifify is being developed publicly on GitHub, so please fork it and submit pull requests and issues! For starters, I’d love to see the dependency on the CloudApp gem removed.

Cloudier Released

2013-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

Cloudier, an awesome CloudApp iOS client, has been released! To celebrate, we’re offering everyone 20% off CloudApp Pro with the checkout code cloudier.

Download it from the App Store, follow @getCloudier, and pick up CloudApp Pro.

There’s a ton of great CloudApp clients out there for just about every platform. We can’t wait to see more great CloudApp apps and integrations!

The Trouble with HTTP Digest Authentication

2013-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

Today we made an accidental guest post of sorts on Avdi Grimm’s Virtuous Code blog about our expreiences with HTTP Digest authentication. If you’ve used our API and had to deal with the authentication scheme we use, I think you’ll relate.

CloudApp CLI

2013-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

Have you been working in your terminal and wanted to quickly throw something into CloudApp? Maybe you created a hilarious gif or want to automate sharing the latest build of your app. The CloudApp CLI is here to make your life in the terminal easier.

$ cloudapp screenshot.png
Uploading screenshot.png... http://cl.ly/image/3U2U2f3B1O0x

$ convert *.png hilarious.gif && cloudapp hilarious.gif
Uploading hilarious.gif... http://cl.ly/image/2y2V051L072p

$ ./build && cloudapp an-twitter-client.zip
Uploading an-twitter-client.zip... http://cl.ly/image/1E1F1k3Q3919

It’s distributed using RubyGems and requires Ruby 1.9.3 at the moment. While you’re installing gems, pick up gem-man to read the manual. You could also read it online.

$ gem install cloudapp gem-man
$ gem man cloudapp

Let us know what you think! Open an issue or send over a pull request.

Twitter Cards

2013-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

Twitter users, rejoice! Images you share with CloudApp and tweet now display nicely on Twitter.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about this or any CloudApp features.

Downtime 3/30 Explained

2012-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

On March 30th, 2012 from 12:07PM until 12:59PM PDT the entire CloudApp service was down.

The reason for the downtime was an oversight adding a column to the database. The column was added with a default value which requires each row of the table to be updated. This change made it through to production because the test database wasn’t large enough to expose the issue ahead of time. When the migration took much longer than expected, we realized that we didn’t have sufficient privileges to stop query. We got in touch with Heroku and they where kind enough to help us out.

The first change we’re making to our deployment process is to run database migrations on a clone of the production database. This will stop similar mistakes before they reach production. In order to stop long running queries in the future, we’ll need to migrate to a new database. We’ll run the migration over the weekend and it’ll only require a minute or two of downtime. We’ll keep everyone posted when we’re ready to make this change at @cloudapp.

Basecamp Next

2012-03-06T00:00:00-08:00

Basecamp Next, a project management tool built by a company we admire, 37Signals, has launched today. There are an endless number of reasons why we love this rework of their flagship product, but I’d like to point out a deceptively small feature that we are particularly fond of.

For us project management is about:

Keeping everyone involved in a very tight feedback loop.
Iterating. A lot.

The new Basecamp allows you to comment on almost anything, maintaining the conversation among team members and often making collaboration more effective than in-person meetings.

As a software company a lot of our conversations evolve around mockups and visuals and while Basecamp Next allows you to attach files to comments it’s hard to beat CloudApp when it comes to sharing screenshots.

Make mockups and screenshots part of your conversations by simply pasting a CloudApp link into Basecamp Next text fields. Upon publishing, an inline preview of the upload will show up:

This will work with content from a lot of web services out there thanks to Embedly (try embedding a link to a Tweet). Make sure to check out their docs to get similar functionality set up for your own site.

Thanks to great collaboration tools like Campfire and Github we were able to build CloudApp, ship it, and scale to over a million users without ever having worked together in the same room (we hadn’t even met each other in person until recently). It’s safe to say we’re pretty excited about anything that helps us collaborate more effectively.

Here’s to increased productivity.

Hojoki Integration

2012-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

Hojoki is a great new app to help teams collaborate and communicate. It doesn’t try to replace any of the tools your team has already come to know and love. It simply brings them all together and leverages what each does best.

We’re thrilled that Hojoki has added CloudApp integration. Share the latest app mockup or some awesome product copy with CloudApp as you’ve always done. Then hop over to Hojoki and send it to everyone for their feedback. That’s all there is to it. No more messy reply-all email chains or missing out because you didn’t keep a keen eye on the chat room.

If you haven’t noticed by now, Hojoki has some serious illustration skills. Tell me this isn’t the most adorable knitting robot you’ve ever seen. As if the integration alone wasn’t enough, they’ve designed a CloudApp-inspired t-shirt. Throw your hat into the ring and you could win one of the 10 they’re giving away!

Sparrow Mail Integration

2011-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

A few months back Sparrow Mail contacted us with a new approach to email attachments leveraging CloudApp. Needless to say, we were very excited to rid the world of email attachments once and for all.

After some minor adjustments to our API, the Sparrow Mail engineering team had CloudApp integrated into their gorgeous mail client. Inline attachments, great upload speeds, and larger filesizes are all features you will love. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Don’t believe me? Check out the demo video they put together.

CloudApp integration is available now in Sparrow Mail, an email client changing mail habits for the better. Grab your copy on the Mac App Store.

Condensing The Rain

2011-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

In the newly-released CloudApp for Mac 1.5, a lot of features have been added and revamped. While creating this new version, we had to account for Mac App Store’s guidelines, especially for loading external code. The raindrop engine got completely rewritten from scratch, and the result is quite fantastic (at least we think so).

The Early Days

The first versions of CloudApp, 1.0 through 1.0.3, used the “typical” Cocoa way of loading code: NSBundle. It worked for what we wanted it to do, and that was load code and be able to easily pass large amounts of data around. In addition, we had it run in a separate thread, which kept the app nice and snappy while waiting for, say, Photoshop to export its canvas data.

Cloud.app would find available raindrop bundles, load them into memory, and keep a reference to the target bundle ID (the application that that raindrop interacted with). When the global hotkey was triggered, we would find the frontmost application, see if there was an applicable raindrop, and run it if there was.

From a first-party standpoint, that was great. However, we soon looked at the possibility of opening this to third party developers. Some problems became evident quite quickly.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Our initial worry was trusting third-party code. It’s a scary thought that someone else’s code would be getting directly loaded into the same memory space as your own. If another developer didn’t handle an exception during the raindrop sequence, the entire Cloud.app would crash. This is a problem for the integrity of CloudApp, and needed to stay stable even when raindrops contain crashers.

Another worry was class conflicts. Loading two classes with the same name, one from CloudApp and the other from a bundle, is bound to cause issues. The Objective-C runtime doesn’t like having this conflict, and throws out one. As a result, there can be unexpected behavior in either CloudApp or the raindrop bundle. This would unreliability was not okay for us, so we looked for a new solution.

Out With the Old, In With the New

Our new raindrop engine is similar to how WebKit handles plugins. Every raindrop is actually its own separate process, and runs independently of CloudApp. If a raindrop were to crash, it would crash the external helper process and not CloudApp itself. Therefore, worry one was alleviated.

Also, since it has its own memory space, there would be no class conflicts with CloudApp. Behavior would be as expected, and all would be well and good.

The Technical Details

How does this work, exactly? The external process is a binary executable that sets up the raindrop, getting it ready for action. It communicates over Distributed Objects to the main CloudApp. CloudApp keeps references to the remote raindrop abstraction layer. It asks the remote raindrop abstraction layer to get the relevant data and call back to CloudApp.

The data is passed between processes by using a unique NSPasteboard. The raindrop passes back the name of the pasteboard. CloudApp reads the data, then destroys the pasteboard. What’s great about this approach is that we have a single handler for all data inputs for uploading. Both dropping on the menu bar item and raindrops result in NSPasteboardItems that we parse and deal with properly.

Honey, Bring Your Umbrella

Another change that we made with the new version is a new type of raindrop: downpour. This type of raindrop stays open constantly and can request a new upload at any time. It allowed us to move our auto-uploading of screenshots into a raindrop, further making CloudApp like a data hub. We have some cool ideas in mind of how developers can utilize downpour raindrops, and can’t wait to see what people come up with.

Lions, Tigers, and App Stores… Oh My!

When mixing the Mac App Store and external processes, much care has to be taken. First of all, processes cannot stay open after the main application has quit without user consent. The raindrop processes much watch the parent process and terminate when it does.

We took this a step farther, though. Raindrops that are only applicable to a certain target application, such as Photoshop or Finder, are only running when they are needed to be. When Photoshop launches, its raindrop process launches. When it quits, so does its raindrop process. CloudApp and raindrops only use resources when they are directly relevant to the user.

With all of these new ways to upload, make sure you upgrade to CloudApp Pro so you never have to stop sharing.

New Drop Views

2011-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

CloudApp Viso, the open source project that powers the links you share, received a major overhaul this week.

What’s Changed?

Here’s a quick and dirty list of what to look for:

Images are scaled to fit your browser. Click or tap the image to toggle the original size. Append /o to a link to share the original size by default.
The content of plain text, Markdown, and code files are shown front and center.
The direct link to any drop is easily accessible.

Images

With more and more apps using CloudApp to share photos, the old image viewer was showing its age. The new image viewer resizes images to fit inside your browser with the original dimensions only being a click or tap away. If you want to make sure the person you’re sharing with sees the full size, simply append /o to the link or copy it from your address bar after zooming the image.

Markdown

We love Markdown. We blog in Markdown, we email in Markdown, and we answer support tickets in Markdown. It’s only natural that we want to share Markdown.

Markdown files are processed by RedCarpet and rendered beautifully for your reading pleasure.

Code

Code drops are syntax highlighted thanks to Pygments and RubyPython. Pygments supports a plethora of languages so give your language of choice a try.

Mobile

Small screens love the new views. Images are clearly visible and text is a joy to read.

Branding

Free CloudApp accounts feature a gorgeous (if I do say so myself) badge in the upper corner letting the world know you’re using CloudApp to share. It’s a small, beautiful price to pay for using our forever free plan. Hate the badge? Upgrade to CloudApp Pro and see it no more!

What do you think?

Love it or loathe it? We want to hear from you. Get in touch with us on Twitter or send us an email with your questions or suggestions.

CloudApp 1.5 Released

2011-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

CloudApp 1.5 has been released and is available for download on the Mac App Store! Get it now. Seriously. Download it. Play with it. Finish reading this post later.

This has been a massive update that we’ve been working on for months. We went back to the drawing board to design a better way to share. The Mac OS X clipboard is a powerful tool and we’ve rebuilt CloudApp on top of it. The result has been a more stable and extensible version of the CloudApp you’ve come to know and love.

What does this mean in practice? Copy anything – a document from Finder, a web address, a picture from iPhoto – and press the hotkey Control + Option + C. It works exactly as if you had dropped it on the menubar icon.

Streaming

This version of CloudApp makes use of our streaming API powered by Pusher. With the Mac app, web app, and Cloud2go all supporting push, you can share with unprecedented ease. Upload a picture using Cloud2go, rename it using the web app, and track how many people have viewed it using the Mac app. Give it a try. It’s loads of fun to watch the view counter on the Mac update in real time after you’ve shared a link.

Recent Drops

Not only does the Recent Drops menu update in real time but you now have a lot more control over your recent drops. By holding down a modifier key or two, you can quickly copy a drop’s link, toggle its privacy, or delete it outright. Take a look at the getting started guide for all the juicy details.

Raindrop API

For the Cocoa developers in the crowd, our Raindrop API is live. Go make something awesome with it and tell us about it.

Release Notes

Here’s a full set of release notes. Enjoy!

Completely re-written code base
Toggle Drop privacy form the Recent Drops history
Upload last item of system clipboard
Dedicated shortcut for Raindrops
Makes use of the CloudApp streaming API (instant Drop and view count updates)
In-app registration
Raindrop SDK
Raindrop update notifications
Fixes authentication issues
Fixes automatic uploading of screenshots files
No longer triggers discrete graphics on MacBook Pro
General bug fixes

Downtime

2011-04-29T00:00:00-07:00

On April 21, 2011 CloudApp experienced a significant period of downtime. All shared links and the service itself was completely unavailable. This is a big deal to us and we don’t take any amount of downtime lightly. To try and make amends, all Pro users will be credited an additional week of service. You’ll receive the credit automagically and there are no links to click or codes to redeem.

Everything shared using CloudApp must be accessible at all times. The bottom line is that while we make heavy use of third parties to run CloudApp, it’s entirely our responsibility to make sure the service is available 24/7. This outage has opened our eyes to several points of failure that we need to address in order to ensure this level of accessibility is met and any downtime is mitigated. Anything that would cause the entire CloudApp service to go down is unacceptable. Not only do lots of people love CloudApp, lots of people depend on CloudApp and have made it integral to their workflow. We take this responsibility very seriously.

We have begun researching and planning ways to make our infrastructure more robust. We’re doing everything we can to be prepared so an outage like this will never happen again.

Ember in the House!

2011-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

Our good friends at Realmac build awesome software like LittleSnapper, Courier, RapidWeaver and a web app for online inspiration-sharing called Ember.

We’ve acquired Ember and starting today we’re taking over.

In the coming weeks we’ll be announcing a new name and look for the service. However, for the time being, Ember lovers will enjoy the same great experience and support they’ve come to expect.

There’s more great news for all you CloudApp users out there. Realmac is integrating CloudApp into both Courier and LittleSnapper! We’re very excited about this partnership so keep your eyes peeled for the update. We’ll let you know the second you can get your hands on it.

Exciting Things Afoot

2011-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

We’ve had a very exciting year — especially the past few weeks — and we’d love to share it with you.

More Choice, More Savings

CloudApp Pro is only $5 per month! Not only that, but we just tore the shrink-wrap off our new store offering pay-as-you-go plans with even more savings. Buy CloudApp Pro for 1-year and only pay for 9 months!

If you’re a current Pro subscriber, snag a new Pro plan and we’ll handle the rest. Don’t worry if you have a few days left on your subscription; we’ll credit your new plan.

If you have a keen eye, you’ll notice we switched from euros to dollars. This is an effort to help many of our customers who are being bamboozled by their banks in the form of foreign transaction fees. While we have no say in how fees are assessed, we’ll do anything in our power to help you avoid them. If you’re being charged any fee in addition to your CloudApp Pro plan, let us know. It’s the only way we can help.

We’ve learned a great deal about billing since rolling out subscriptions 3 months ago. Mainly that reoccurring charges can’t be trusted — at least not with our merchant account. Many of you have experienced issues with subscription billing ranging anywhere from credit card rejections to the inability to begin a subscription. We’re still seeking a resolution from our merchant account, but the new one-time plans solve many of our subscription niggles.

PayPal

You read that right. PayPal! It’s been a hugely requested feature and we’re proud to announce you can buy any of our new plans using PayPal. There are many reasons why people have been unable to purchase Pro using a credit card and this is just one more option for them.

One Hundred Thousand!

We reached a huge milestone: there are over 100,000 people using CloudApp! The reception has been staggering. You’re recommending CloudApp to your friends and colleagues and it’s been amazing to watch the steady, continued growth.

Applications

More and more developers are choosing to integrate CloudApp into their applications. For example:

Courier by Realmac

Upload images, photos, movies, and other files to your CloudApp account by simply dragging them into an envelope. Courier will ensure they make it safely to their destination. Available on the Mac App Store.

FluffyApp

FluffyApp brings CloudApp goodness to Windows, and there was much rejoicing! Upload by dragging files onto a taskbar icon just like CloudApp for Mac.

iOS

If you’d like to browse your uploads on your iPhone, check out two great options: Cloud2go and Cloudette.

Looking to the Future

With your support, CloudApp has gone farther in 2010 than we thought possible. What started as a simple idea has turned into a thriving business in only a few months’ time. We’re thrilled and greatly humbled that you find CloudApp valuable enough to trade your hard-earned money; we don’t take this lightly.

We’re only getting warmed up. Our sights are set high for 2011 and we can’t wait to show you the fantastic features we have up or sleeve.

Privacy Redux

2010-11-12T00:00:00-08:00

As you may be aware, we had quite a day at CloudApp yesterday. A little site named CloudApp Roulette cropped up on the internet. The premise is simple: pick a random public — the operative word here is public — URL and display the image stored there.

No big deal, right? They’re public links so those images shouldn’t be confidential. The unfortunate truth is that is simply not the case. If you’re using short links, your files are immediately susceptible to scripts like CloudApp Roulette.

If you use CloudApp, take a moment right now and switch to long links. Do it. If you want to Tweet a link, simply go to your items list and click the lock button to flip it to a short, Tweetable link.

Updates

We took the opportunity yesterday to make several changes to CloudApp with regard to protecting your uploads.

Disable image embedding. At this moment, you can’t add an image you’ve uploaded to your blog or the like. This stops CloudApp Roulette in the short term, but it is not meant as a permanent solution nor is it a silver bullet to prevent someone determined to sift through public uploads.
Clear copy describing the difference between short and long links.
A single button to convert all your uploads to long links preventing everything you’ve uploaded to CloudApp from appearing in attacks like CloudApp Roulette.

Myths

I’d like to take a moment to dispel a myth. There is a small thread on Lifehacker spreading the myth that guessing a long link (20 characters) isn’t any more difficult than guessing a short link (4 characters). Short links aren’t sequential, but the algorithm we use is meant to be efficient. Each letter is precious and we’re not wasting them. Because there are no “holes”, it’s trivial to guess a short link and find a public upload. This is by design and it’s what makes CloudApp Roulette possible.

Long links, on the other hand, are case-sensitive, alphanumeric, random (using Ruby’s SecureRandom API) 20-character links. 20 isn’t much more than 4 so it stands to reason that one could write a similar script to CloudApp Roulette targeted at long links and have similar success.

Enter: Math

Let’s see what the real odds are. Each of the 20 characters in the link can be one of 62 possibilities (a-z, A-Z, 0-9). This puts the total number of unique links at:

62^20 = 704,423,425,546,998,022,968,330,264,616,370,176

I’m not smart enough to know how to pronounce that number so I’ll just say 704 billion trillion trillion (I hope I counted correctly). It’s a significant number.¹ To use an absurd analogy, if this was a stack of papers, it would stretch from here to the sun.

… 503,159,589,676,427,159,263 times

To calculate the probability of picking a long URL at random and finding anything, let’s assume we have a billion uploads. We have a lot less, but it hardly matters.

1,000,000,000 / 62^20 = 0.0000000000000000000000000014196

Approximately 1 in a thousand trillion trillions.² You can see why we consider long links effectively private.

Conclusion

You may look at these numbers and feel pretty good about storing something very sensitive on CloudApp like your credit card number, legal documents or super secret Delta Force mission plans. Please don’t. It takes a lot of work to become PCI compliant and, quite honestly, CloudApp’s architecture isn’t, nor will it ever be, up to those standards.

CloudApp makes sharing data dead easy. Please use discretion.

Until yesterday we used base16 instead of base62 for long links. The total unique links are still very large: 16^20 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176
↩
I’m not a statistician by any means. If there is a flaw in the above logic, please let me know.
↩

The Next Level

2010-10-15T00:00:00-07:00

We have spent the past months building a rock solid platform for CloudApp and managed to optimize our infrastructure saving up to 90% of our resources. It’s time to take the next step.

Today we are launching CloudApp Free & CloudApp Pro, a month-to-month subscription plan.

CloudApp Free

Create unlimited bookmarks
Upload 10 files a day (max file size 25MB)
Update: keep your files forever

CloudApp Pro (4€/month)

Create unlimited bookmarks
Upload unlimited files a day (max file size 250MB)
Keep your files forever
Use your own domain name

We don’t want you to worry about disk storage or network transfer when your uploads get popular, leave that to us. Both plans include unlimited bandwidth and disk storage.

To upgrade to CloudApp Pro simply visit your account page.

We hope you are as excited as we are to take CloudApp to the next level.

Somebody Said Courier

2010-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

The Realmac Software guys just released their newest application — Courier. We’ve had the chance to play with it for the past weeks and write some software for it.

Courier allows you to share documents, images, movies and more with popular online services, including Flickr and Facebook.

It wouldn’t be a true file sharing utility for the Mac if it didn’t support CloudApp, now would it? Thanks to Courier’s plugin API we were able to write an extension that allows you to upload your files to CloudApp right within Courier.

Head over to the Courier website to grab the app and download the CloudApp plugin.

Licence To Kill

2010-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

Earlier today we ran heroku db:reset --app appname mistakenly replacing appname with the Heroku application powering the CloudApp infrastructure and API (blame @mschoening). Even without a degree in computer science you can probably guess what happened next. After a short outage we restored the database from a 2 hour old backup.

Performing queries and maintenance tasks repeatedly can quickly turn into a routine (such as appending --app appname to a command). Routines are executed without thorough validation and can therefore lead to disastrous consequences. To prevent future incidents we are putting protocols in place that have to be followed from now on when working with live data. Additionally we are now performing incremental database backups every 30 minutes to minimize the loss of data.

We are very sorry for the trouble we might have caused and we will make sure this does not happen again.

Third Party CloudApp Clients

2010-08-27T00:00:00-07:00

When we first launched our REST API we were unsure wether developers would see this as an opportunity to write great software powered by CloudApp infrastructure. Now we know better.

Already a number of applications make use of our service and we are proud to announce two full featured CloudApp clients built by third party developers on top of our API:

Cloud2go

Cloud2go is a great iPhone app that gives you access to all your uploads directly on your iOS device and allows you to upload images, videos and bookmarks with ease. You can find out more about Cloud2go here. Did we mention that it’s available on the App Store?

FluffyApp

One of the most requested features by our users was a Windows version of CloudApp. FluffyApp is currently in public beta and now includes Autoupload for screenshots. Go check it out.

In the coming month we will release new tools, documentation and logos to make your lives as developers a lot easier.

The Only Way To Scan

2010-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

Whenever we come across a task we have to perform repeatedly and are unhappy with existing solutions, we build a simple tool that does one thing and one thing well. On occasion that tool turns into a product like CloudApp.

Writing software is a lot easier for us than manufacturing hardware so when that tedious task turns out to be scanning there is very little we can do. Scanners are big, the included software is terrible, and sharing a scanned document is a chore.

A few weeks ago the makers of Doxie approached us with their solution. We were blown away. Not only had they created excellent hardware and software but one-click file sharing with CloudApp was built right in. Delivering scanned documents couldn’t be easier: press a single button to start scanning, upload the document to CloudApp with a click, and share the short URL with co-workers and friends.

Starting today you can get a Doxie scanner with CloudApp built in. If you already own a Doxie, grab the free software update here.

Privacy Settings

2010-05-11T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

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

2010-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

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.