Celebrating MacDropAny’s Success

Today MacDropAny passed an amazing milestone: a grand total of 160,000 folders synced to the cloud. Since MacDropAny was released in February 2011, it’s been used by thousands of people in over 80 countries.

People love MacDropAny because it just works. It’s by far the most simple way to sync any folder on your Mac with a number of great cloud syncing services, allowing you to gain access to your important files from wherever you are.

Recently, with the release of version 2, more sync services were added so that MacDropAny now supports syncing with Dropbox, Box.com, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and iClouDrive. To support MacDropAny’s international user base, version 2 added support for French, Dutch, Spanish and German, making it even easier for people all over the world to use.

Here are some interesting statistics about MacDropAny:

  • Over 160,000 folders have been synced with the cloud.
  • Approximately 70% of MacDropAny’s users can use the app in their native language.
  • The largest user group is from the United States (18% of users), followed by Germany (10%), Spain (8%), and France (7%).
  • A folder is synced using MacDropAny, on average, once every 5 minutes.

I’ve received some fantastic feedback about MacDropAny. It’s rated 4.5 out of 5 stars on MacUpdate.com, and has been well reviewed in MacWorld, LifeHacker, Applesfera (in Spanish), Me Cambio a Mac (in Spanish) and many more sites.

None of this would have been possible without the amazing support of MacDropAny’s users and the amazing people who donate to help support continued development. MacDropAny is free, and this is only possible because of users’ kind generosity. I’d like to thank everyone who has donated, tweeted, blogged, helped with bug testing and translated for me – without you guys, MacDropAny wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is today.

MacDropAny is constantly evolving (and hopefully improving too!). If you’ve got a suggestion for a new feature, a new service to sync folders with, or just want to say hello, please feel free to send me a message.

Thanks,
Sebastian Hallum Clarke (MacDropAny’s 15 year old developer) 

MacDropAny now in French, Dutch, German & Spanish!

I’m very happy to report that with the release of MacDropAny v2.03 last night, MacDropAny is now available in a total of four languages; French, Dutch, German and (of course) English.

I’d like to extend a big thank you to the great translators, Leander Stellemans for Dutch and Thomas Schulze for German, who have helped me to bring MacDropAny to the native languages of many more users. Someone has kindly offered to translate MacDropAny into Spanish, and I expect to have this included in an update soon.

If you speak another language, and would be willing to spend about 15 minutes translating some MacDropAny into your native language, please get in touch. At the moment, I’m especially keen to get an Italian translation, but all languages will be happily accepted.

Update (23 Nov 2012): Thanks to Fernando Sánchez, MacDropAny v2.05 is now available in Spanish! You can get the latest version here.

MacDropAny v2.01

Version 2.01 of MacDropAny, the easiest way to sync any folder on your computer with the cloud, was released today. This update adds a Dutch localization (thanks to Leander Stellemans!) and also fixes a bug which caused a fatal error message to appear if a duplicate folder was about to be made.

You can get the latest update on the MacDropAny page.

Calling for Feature Requests for MacDropAny v2

MacDropAny was originally released in February 2011 as an easy way to sync and folder on your computer with Dropbox. Since then, support has been added for Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive, and over 145,000 folders have been synced.

I’m now in the process of entirely re-writing MacDropAny to be faster, more bug-resistant, and to have more features. To this end, I’d love to hear what features you’d like to see in the next version of MacDropAny. I’m especially interested to hear if there are any other cloud services you’d like to have MacDropAny work with.

If you have any feature request, please either comment on this post, or send me a message and I’ll see what I can do.

How to sync a folder to multiple computers

I am often asked for instructions for how to synchronise a folder to multiple computer. This could be useful if you wanted to have your Desktop, Documents folder, or something else easily accessible on all of your Macs.

This can be done easily thanks to MacDropAny, my free app. To do this, just follow these simple instructions:

  1. Make sure that you have a backup of your computer (or at least a backup copy of the files you are going to be tinkering with). As outlined in the Zibity Software Licence, I cannot be held responsible for any loss of data incurred as a result of using my apps.
  2. Pause (or quit) Dropbox on all of the computers which you want to sync
  3. On the first computer, use MacDropAny to sync your Desktop folder (or Documents, Downloads, etc.).
  4. Repeat this previous step on all of your other computers, however you must make sure that you locate the “Dropbox copy” of the folder in the same location inside your Dropbox. For example, in the root (top) folder of your Dropbox, and you must make sure that when you are asked what you want the folder to be called, that you use the same name on all of your computers.
  5. Unpause (or launch) Dropbox on all of your computers at the same time.
    Let Dropbox sync all of the changes.

If everything has worked correctly, you should now have a folder which magically keeps itself in sync.

You can do this with any folder which is on your local machine (ie not on an external drive). Additionally, it is not reccomended to sync folders with thousands of files (your Applications folder, for example), as Dropbox can sometimes throw a bit of a hissy fit when you do this.

If you find MacDropAny particularly useful, please consider making a small donation to help support future development. I’m only 15 years old, so any contribution, no matter how small, will be greatly appreciated.

Version 1.8.3 of MacDropAny has been released!

I’m happy to release version 1.8.3 of MacDropAny. This update fixes a bug which prevented users from syncing a folder located at the root of the drive. Go get it!