Syncplicity Blog

We set up a FriendFeed group for Syncplicity over the weekend as a more informal venue to mention what’s on our minds and what we’ve got up our sleeves. Hope to see you there!

Need to quickly send a file to someone? Don’t bother with email! It’s slow, unsecured, and has limits on the size of your attachments. Why not just let your mom, friend, or colleague download your file with a single click?

With the latest update to Syncplicity, you can. If your files are being synced by Syncplicity, your computer already did all the hard work of uploading them - so why do it again? Just right click on any file in any Syncplicity folder, open the Syncplicity menu, and click “Get a shareable link…”. Syncplicity will come right back with a link you can send to anyone.

This is what it looks like:

And this is the window that will pop right up:

The link you get is a public one so anyone, even people without Syncplicity accounts, will be able to use it if they find out about it. The link contains a secret key so only those people you give the link to (and people they give it to) will be able to dowload your file.

And as everything else in Syncplicity, all downloads are secure and fully encrypted.

Let us know what you think about this feature on our forums - we’d love to hear about how you use it!

Have a great week,
Ondrej

Find out what’s new in version 2.0.3087.

Syncplicity has been getting a lot of great press coverage lately. You may have run across these articles, but I’ll be the first to admit that you’d be hard-pressed to find any of these reviews through our website. We’re working on updating our website, but in the meantime I’ll post new reviews here. While we’re still in the process of hunting down all Syncplicity reviews, here are a few from the past week that I’ve run across:

Hear it here first — literally. The Power of Information radio talk show recently covered Syncplicity. You can listen to the full show by clicking here. Fast-forward to 17:07 to hear just the Syncplicity specific bits. You can also listen to it on the radio. Times are available on their site.

VUNet’s blog, Download Junkies did a comparison of Syncplicity and SugarSync, concluding: “We have both a SugarSync and Syncplicity account and prefer the design of Syncplicity.”

MakeUseOf recently covered Syncplicity as in an article with a great title, “A Tryst with Syncplicity”. I didn’t entirely get their Cheer/Boo system though.

Austrailian magazine, PC Authority honored Syncplicity with their highest rating, 5 out of 5 stars.

I’m excited to see such great reviews, especially since we’re still in beta!

Leonard

We’re excited to announce an improved online file browser for files you’re synchronizing with Syncplicity.  In this release we made the following improvements:

• Recycle a file/folder - Moves a file to the Recycle Bin online and on your local computers
• Permanently delete a file/folder - Completely remove a file from Syncplicity’s backup
• Empty Syncplicity Recycle Bin - Clears all deleted files from Syncplicity’s backup
• Add New Directory - Create a new directory from the online browser
• New navigation buttons: Back & Forward, and Up Directory
• Improved the tree navigation and fixed several bugs

Here’s a shot of the new file browser in action:

There’s a brand new pop-out menu on files.  You can either right-click on a file/folder or click the little Syncplicity icon to bring it up.  Right now, we have a few options in the menu and we’re planning several more.  Here’s the menu in action:

And here’s the menu when you’re browsing deleted files in the Syncplicity Recycle Bin:

We’re excited to publish these updates as they’re based on a lot of user feedback.  Keep sending us your suggestions!

- Isaac

Hi everyone,

Our blog was a long time coming and I’m excited to finally see it up here ready for postings!

What do I do at Syncplicity? During the day, I figure out what you – our users – want from Syncplicity. I take all your feedback and use it to decide what our product needs next and what shape our new features need to take. I’m the guy who loves to get emails, forum replies, and blog comments from you because they make my job so much for fun, not to mention so much easier!

The rest of my time is spent making sure Syncplicity fulfills its promise of bridging your desktop and the web. We envision a future where it won’t matter where you store and work with your files – we want that to be something you don’t even have to think about. After all, why shouldn’t you be free to use the best tool for the job in the best environment possible? Whether that tool is a desktop application or an online Web 2.0 site, or whether that environment is your desktop or your browser, Syncplicity will make sure your data is everywhere it needs to be.

We have a lot in store for the future and I can’t wait to start sharing that with you, discussing your ideas and suggestions, and hearing from you about what works and what doesn’t. Looking forward to catching up with you on our forums!

Ondrej

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Isaac.  Today, the database, a few back-end systems, and the website are my focus.  Let me tell you a little about what makes this pretty darn interesting from a DBA perspective:

The Syncplicity database is pretty incredible.  Most website databases perform a lot of read operations and a few writes, mainly to maintain a little state information about the user.  I think 10 - 100 KB is more than enough state information per user for almost any web database.  However, the Syncplicity database is nothing like that.  Our databases have quickly grown to triple digit GBs in size as we synchronize your files across all your computers.  That’s a lot of state and a lot of writing.  Pretty incredible!  And, we’re scaling very well to handle the load.  So, keep it coming!

Feel free to contact me thru the comments, forums, or Contact page if there’s something you’d like to know.  We’ve got some exciting information in the works… stay tuned!

Cheers,
Isaac - VP of Technology

On behalf of the Syncplicity team, welcome to the Syncplicity blog!

We will be posting the latest and greatest news, useful tips and tricks, and some of our thoughts so you can see some of our thinking as Syncplicity grows and moves out of beta.

Along with myself, Syncplicity’s other co-founders, Ondrej and Isaac, will be posting on here as well. They’ll be introducing themselves shortly.

We have some topics lined up over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions or topics you’re interested in, post up a message in the Syncplicity Forums. We’ll be taking interesting questions and hot topics from the forums and covering them in more detail here.

I’m very excited about this new blog. It’s my hope that you’ll find this informative and have as much fun reading it as we have writing it!

Leonard Chung - CEO

We publicly launched on April 15th, 2008.  Most Americans know this day as tax day but for us it was a great day.  We finally got to reveal our site and service to everyone.  We’ve been working hard since launch to incorporate all your feedback.  Since then, we’ve worked to make the service easier to use and understand and work just like you’d expect.  Continue sending us feedback and we’ll do our best to improve this service.

We’re starting this blog so we can share some of our ideas with you.  We also want to let you in on a little inside information as we go along.  Stay tuned.