Networking's a cinch, with Dropbox, Growl

I'm working on a project that involves testing things on up to five Macs, and sharing files (mostly screenshots) among them.

The Mac has always had an edge when it comes to networking, making it easy to find other computers on your network and connect to them. But this time around, I can say the process is actually effortless, thanks to the online storage service Dropbox and a clever utility called Growl.

Glenn Fleishman wrote in-depth about Dropbox earlier this year (Practical Mac, Feb. 28), but the gist is this: You sign up for a free account (www.getdropbox.com), which gives you 2 gigabytes of storage on Dropbox's servers.

To upload files, you copy them to a Dropbox folder that appears in your home folder. Anything in that folder is automatically copied to the server, so you don't have to worry about logging in to an FTP site using dedicated software.

What's great about Dropbox is that any time you change your Dropbox folder — add or remove files, create folders, and so on — the changes are reflected almost immediately on the server. Even better, the changes appear on every machine on which you have Dropbox installed and active.

For my project, I'm using SnapzPro X (www.ambrosiasw.com) to take screenshots, which gives me the option of saving the images in the location of my choice; Mac OS X can take screenshots, too (press Command-Shift-3 or Command-Shift-4), but the images are saved to the Desktop. I've set SnapzPro X to save all files to a folder within my Dropbox folder.

The result is that shortly after I capture the screen on one test machine, the image file appears in the corresponding folder on my main computer.

(Another quick advantage worth mentioning is that Dropbox saves versions of files for 30 days — longer if you pay for a higher tier of service — so if you accidentally delete a file, you can recover it easily.)

Growl for attention: Growl (growl.info) is a simple utility that pops unobtrusive alerts onto the screen. A long and growing list of applications use Growl to display notifications.

For example, SpamSieve (c-command.com/spamsieve/) notes when it's received spam e-mail that could just as likely be legitimate; or Twitterrific (iconfactory.com) can display an alert when new Twitter messages arrive so you can scan and discard their contents without bringing up the application itself.

When you put Dropbox and Growl together, you get little status updates whenever a file or folder changes in the Dropbox folder. In my example above, I see that the screenshot taken on the test Mac is ready to be used on my main Mac.

That capability becomes more helpful when you're working on a project with multiple people, all using a shared Dropbox folder.

As soon as a colleague makes a change to a document, Dropbox pops up a Growl notification — you don't need to wait for the person to send you an e-mail telling you the file is ready (thanks to so much spam, e-mail is becoming a less reliable communications medium).

You can configure how Growl notifications appear in the Growl pane in the System Preferences, choosing from many themes that range from semi-transparent floating blobs to a music-video style title that appears at the bottom of the screen.

Another thing I find invaluable about Growl is a secondary utility called HardwareGrowler (it's in the Extras folder included with the Growl download). It reports when hardware has changed, such as when you attach a USB device or external hard disk, or connect to a network.

When you eject a disk, for example, there's always a bit of limbo time before it's actually ready to be disconnected. I can't tell you how many times I've unplugged a hard drive a second too early and gotten a warning message that I may have corrupted its data. (Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, due in September, makes ejecting devices more reliable, according to Apple's online information about the operating system.)

The combination of Dropbox and Growl is saving me a lot of time as I shuttle files between multiple Macs on a complicated project. It's eminently satisfying to know that something is just working, so I can focus my attention on more important things than network file transfers.

Dropbox is also available under Windows and Linux, and an iPhone version is being developed; Growl runs only under Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.