Searching Data With CloudMagic
Photo courtesy CloudMagic
With the growing popularity of cloud services, chances are you have multiple accounts with various services. Thanks to my MidWeek colleague Russell Kaya, I discovered CloudMagic, a service that allows you to fast search across all your data. You don’t have to remember where you stored things anymore, and you don’t have to waste time searching every folder or account. This compiles all your madness into one source.
In the past, CloudMagic only worked with Firefox and Chrome browsers, but now it works with Safari and Internet Explorer (as a browser extension). It is also a mobile app for your iPhone, iPad or Android device. To begin using it, sign up for a free account, then link your services – Gmail, Google Apps, Twitter, Microsoft Exchange, Facebook, Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, Evernote, Box, iCloud, AOL, Mail.com, GMX and Google Talk.
After your account access is granted, CloudMagic indexes your accounts, which typically takes several hours. You can do your searches immediately, but the indexing must be complete for accurate results. With the latest version recently released, the interface is revamped, and you see all your results displayed in a column that appears below the CloudMagic search box as soon as you begin typing. Your results are organized by source (i.e., if you enter a search string while on Gmail, you’ll see the results from there, but also can see results from other accounts).
On the plus side, CloudMagic promptly finds your emails, documents and contacts (across accounts) as you type, and the index is stored locally for speed, offline searches, privacy and security. The searches allow you to narrow the results to sender, subject and attachment file names.
On the negative side, as mentioned earlier, you have to go through the time-consuming index process, which could possibly take days if you have a very large amount of data.
Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: SimplePrints
SimplePrints is a free app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod created by local boy Matt Sullivan. It’s inspired by Storytree’s previous efforts of preserving memories, but this new app allows you to build photobooks using your iPhone’s photos or others stored online (Facebook, Instagram or Pic Stitch). A typical softcover 8.5-by-8.5-inch photobook will cost you $9.95 for 20 pages, and as with Storytree, you can tell the story in your books. There may be a hardcover option in the future, but not yet.
“If you look at the existing players out there, like Shutterfly, we constantly hear people telling us ‘I spent weekends building this book,'” Sullivan recently told TechCrunch. “It’s great when I have it, but it’s such a painful process to get there.”
The company decided to launch the new product on mobile for simplicity’s sake.
“For us, it seemed like a no-brainer because most of our users have their pictures on their phones, and even getting your pictures from your phone to your computer is an added step,” Sullivan added.
In the future we might possibly see a new app that ties Storytree and SimplePrints together. Take advantage of this great free app (or both) – it’s a free download from the iTunes App Store.
