FireUploader

by

Rjonna 

What: An application to make Box.net accessible directly from your browser.

Why: Because it’s fast. Besides, who doesn’t want to turn Firefox into their OS?

How: Javascript and the Box.net API.

Fireuploader is intuitive and has a well-designed UI. But that’s only so helpful to a developer who wants to improve their project, so here are some ideas for future developments:

1. Syncing support. I often find that lots of my “house cleaning” activities take place while I’m offline. Taking care of uploading and backing up important files can’t happen if I don’t have a web connection, but by using a new offline/online framework such as Google Gears or another kind of local SQLite implementation, perhaps Fireuploader could be a killer app for offline as well as online use.

2. Parallel Publishing. Fireuploader has seperate interfaces for Flickr and Box. At first, this seems to make sense. Why would I want to store photos in more than one location?

When a photo is really important to me, and I have a service like Box that can act as a safe deposit space, maybe a more appropriate question is Why Not?

There’s a hilarious video that the Onion published last week.

While this scenario is far-fetched, what isn’t so far-fetched is the idea that you may want to do something with important files that the web service you originally published to won’t allow you to do.

By sending your file in parallel to Box.net, you have an insurance policy against such scenarios.

Because FireUploader eventually intends to interface with many different web services, I could imagine it being very useful for users to have the ability to easily publish files to Box.net as well as other applications 

I’d like to thank Rjonna again for using Box.net in his app. While most Box.net API apps are either server-side or add onto desktop apps, it’s great seeing your extension bridging the two together with admirable ease-of-use. 

We’ll keep an eye out for more of Rjonna’s projects.

-James

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.