Discussion on:

The 10 best cross-platform applications

Dropbox is a great free app that I use mainly with my iPhone to transfer large file to my computers. I use it on my Macs and PCs and it is wonderful never tried it with Linux but it is compatible. Also, you can access them from anywhere via their website. Overall I have found it very handy over the past years.

I was thinking the same exact thing when i did not see drop box on the list.

It does seem handy and has turned up installed by users on our work machines. I'd like to hear more about how they manage it in the back end. Is my pocket of storage encrypted so that only I have access or is the file repository open to anyone on the hosting side of the site?

I use DropBox and your files are encrypyed and only accesable using your username and password, files put in your public DropBox folder are accesable to everyone.

Hope that helps.

I just watched yesterday on TechRepublic the 5 ways to keep your employees from stealing data. One was a policy against things like dropbox. While it maybe useful and secure, it is probably against policy at many larger and less progressive companies. You should check before you give them cause.

Read the terms of service!!!!!

"...YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX,' 'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX..."

All Caps is their emphasis.

A secure file is one that you and only you have access to.

It is just warning you that when you put a file in that folder it makes the file available to dropbox so you can access it from another computer. If you don't put your files in the designated folders you won't be able to access them from another location.

You're a trusting soul, aren't you?

I've learned from experience (and the news) that unless I, personally, control the security measures, it can't necessarily be trusted.

...and of course, even for the things I DO control, it's still dependent on my own level of skill. Even so, for me, it's better trusted than depending on someone else's diligence.

Didn't meant to go completely off topic but tangents are fun and I did some reading.

Transfers too and from user and DropBox servers is by SSL so your mostly safe there (DNS spoof and a few SSL attacks possibly).

On drop box servers, files are AES encrypted so only user can access and decrypt. Even staff are supposed to be locked out. DropBox actually uses Amazon S3 hosted storage. This means you get the additional AES encryption that Amazon does along with encrypted transfers. From what I read, that means that your file is SSL encrypted during transit to DropBox server where it is AES encrypted upon receipt. I can't tell if it is then sent on to S3 servers for the second AES encryption or what. Tapping the network traffic after SSL but before AES is a remote risk but not easy. I believe DropBox does have the encryption keys as the servers need to work with the files at times. Since they use Amazon's US hosting there is the risk of a national security letter in absence of evidence that would justify a warrant but you'd have to be interesting enough.

Where S3 is meant as bottomless bulk storage, DropBox is meant to be a synchronization tool and has storage limitations.

The public folder is world readable and photos folders can also be made world readable but will include all sub-folders.

All files and folders are contained within your %userprofile%\My Documents\DropBox folder. The client app on your local machine monitors the directory and sends/receives changed files at time of change. Install the client on multiple machines and your DropBox folder is synchronized between them all automatic like.

The best solution appears to be including a Truecrypt volume in your DropBox folder. The blob file will then be kept synchronized between the central server and your client machines. Strong encryption is controlled only by you but that volume file can get big and I'm not sure if it sends just the part of the file which has changed. Other methods of encrypting files work also.

If I could install the sync engine on my own server I'd be all over this thing.

Not only VMware is not cross-platform (look at the requirements for reunning it on Windows), its licencing scheme is also extremely limiting.
And I've not even been able to use it on any notebook.

VirtualBox on the opposite works perfectly, and is not installing so many system components on the host (the many special drivers and special tweaks that VMware installs on Wnidows are really threatening, and are causing the host system to become really unstable, up to the point that some system updates will no longer work).

VMware is far behind in terms of cross-platform compatibility, and also it still cannot correctly load existing virtual disks.

NO, VMware will not load all virtual drives initially created with Microsoft Server, or VirtualPC, because it still does not accept those created with incremental storage : only disks with a fuly preallocated fixed size will be accepted by VMware.

VirtualBox on the opposite supports (and runs perfectly) with incremental virtual disks (incremental disks are extremely useful to create fast snapshots, notably before installing and trying/evaluating some software in a safe environment).

And VirtualBox also runs on PCs whose processors DON'T have the hardware support for virtual machines (most PCs sold for home/SOHO users, still don't have this support, including those in the current high-end level of prices ; those processors are still reserved by many manufacturers for their server offers and some professional segments, and processor manufacturers, especially Intel, are still extremely unclear about the VM support in their processor models)

Ask in any shop, they will be completely unable to tell you if the PC will support VMs by hardware, and most of these PC are uneligible to Windows 7's "XP mode" for example. You have to go in a shop and ask them to run a tool like CPUZ to see if their PC is eligible (even Windows 7 still hides this info in its configuration panel, until you want to run its "XP mode", which is a very poor VM environment replacing VirtualPC which worked in XP and Vista but no longer works in Windows 7)

Really, for all these problems, VirtualBox is THE only working solution. And it works on many more host environments than VMwares, and supports many more guest systems. In addition, it is MUCH more stable than VMware, and does not infect the host system with so many tweaks (this means that the host system will run without any performance impact, when the VM application is not used).

Used for many years.
Great multilayer photo editor.
Use as a free replacement for Adobe photoshop.

I send my light users on Windows platform toward Paint.net if the don't need real tools.

4.) ugh I wish they could fix things, truly. bloatware, use foxit instead, many other good alternatives.

10.) I use VLC and CCCP to keep old machines in use playing media that can't even begin to run in Media Player.

As a picture viewer, modifier, and also to drive my scanner.

PM.

Sigh... how I miss IrfanView.

I recently made the switch from Windows to Mac, and Irfanview is probably the app I miss the most. XnView is a good replacement for viewing only, but I haven't found anything as lean and as versatile as IrfanView for making quick edits.

If only it really was cross platform!

My personal experience with VMWare is a painful one, it is slow - I use virtual machines to do development work and VMWare is simply painfully slow to use - especially running Windows guest in my Linux Host... the pain.

My search for a cross-platform VM ended when I found VirtualBox.

I have several VMs that need to apear with there own IP and MAC on the network. Host only or NAT networking won't work for them. Do you use virtualbox with bridged networking and how did you set that up?

(I'm running two eth# through a bond0 device and trying to set the bridge against bond0.. no luck yet.)

I know you didn't ask me, but I've used Bridged networking in my home network... DHCP works just fine in my guest PC with bridged networking...

So if you do have DHCP setup in your host PC, your guest PC should work with DHCP as well, and if not, just set the static IP address and that should work..

Do you mean bridged between your home and the outside network or a Debian 64bit with VMware Server 2 and bridged clients fetching DHCP from a separate appliance?

In searching, I've found my issue remarkably specific. I've even found exact matches for the error logs. Lots of reports, no solutions. Booo!

So, I thought I'd confirm your setup before asking a bunch of detailed questions.

I wonder if the list should include apps that make transparent no-brainer use of Wine to run on Linux. Check out Google's Picasa

I like VirtualBox and use it because it's free but it is a PITA to get bridged networking to work, if you can get it to work at all

You've probably tried to use the non-default configuration and forgot to read the special requirements and jsutification for these alternate configs.

The virtual network interface drivers (emulations of physical NIC) of VirtualBox work perfectly, and I think they are much safer in terms of security than using a bridge configuration : the VM guests appear as additional PCs on the network and can benefit of all network securities implemented on physical hosts. In summary, virtual NICs are much safer for the host as they provide really a isolation level exactly similar to your physical NIC on your host (in addition they are even faster, especially on hosts whose processor don't have hardware VM support and that VirtualBox fully support, unlike: VMware, MS Hyper V for Windows Server, and "XP mode" for MS Windows 7): no problem for configuring them just use the default DHCP configuration (almost all Internet routers for broadband include a DHCP server, so this is really Plug'n Play and most users don't even need to configure anything for getting connected to the local network and the Internet)

your post motivated me to check the latest version. Bridged networking seems to work like a charm. There is no simple "start at boot" checkbox but scripting works well enough in for now.

VirtualBox is great....compared to VMware, I'll take VirtualBox!

I find controlling a vm in VMWare on the physical server to be painfully slow. Over the network using remote desktop it is fast. MS Hyper V and VirtualBox are both fast on the physical server and through remote desktop. At least that is my experience.

point 4 says: ``But none of those unique viewers offers the quality and ease of use that Adobe Reader provides''
maybe the right sentence was ``But none of those unique viewers offers the huge resource allocation and ease of exploitability that Adobe Reader provides''

I can't stand that crap. I use evince (Document Viewer) in Linux and it's faster, lighter, and does all that I need it to, which is view. I don't want to do any other BS, I just want to view.

These are the same reasons why I use Foxit Reader which is also cross platform.

One nice feature of PDFs is that you can fill them in and print them, but I also like to save the fill-ins, and sometimes that is disabled in Reader. Does Foxit allow you to override that?

...the long load times, the lost resources, and all the other crap it tries to drop on your drive.

Foxit does the job for me.

I've switched all my users to FOXIT, in many cases without notifying them. The only comments I got related to how fast their PDF files were opening now.

Adobe reader is far too heavy and far too slow.

One thing that annoyed me with Adobe is when they went single-document interface (poorly) to make it more like the Mac product. (Of course, if I wanted that, I would have bought a mac.)

With Foxit I can have multiple documents open at once, but each appears to be in its own instance of Foxit. Opening a pdf is very fast, but I'm not sure about memory usage.

They do open fast, and I can put them in the same parent window and not clutter the start bar.

Now, if they would just come out with an alternative Flash reader!

I need to read service manuals with tiny type in the schematics. Foxit couldn't render them sharply, but Acrobat Reader could blow them up as large as I needed, razor-sharp. Yes, it's a slow hog, but it works where Foxit didn't for me.

'' But none of those unique viewers offers the quality and ease of use that Adobe Reader provides''

Quality = absolutely awful
Ease of use = painful

The reason no one else offers anything like Adobe Reader is that anyone trying to offer such utter and complete rubbish would be laughed at openly.

The only reason people put up with this trash from Adobe is because they own the mindspace amongst those who think that using pdf documents is meant to be as much fun as jamming your pinky finger into an electric pencil sharpener.

Adobe has become lazy and complacent and its products are stuck in a nasty old time warp.

Sad and completely unnecessary for this once great company to be committing slow motion suicide.

Exactly how many time have you been affected by a Reader exploit? Stop with the FUD.

Anyone have VMware Server 2 installed clean on a Debian 64bit system? It's the only option that makes bridged networking a simple checkbox but I'm getting a five to fifteen minute hang when the web management service is restarted (or times out failing to restart).

It was a dream to use on RPM based distributions. Debian 64bit is not obscure enough to justify the broken install.

And, with teamviewer, we've gone for VNC plus an encryption plugin and lack of license fee for commercial use. Teamviewer is an interesting option to keep in mind though. I'd like to know more about how there back end works.

Nice list. Some others I use in both Lin/Win:

Blender http://blender.org is an uber-powerful 3D rendering workbench that is also a great audio/video editor with a plugin for JACK synchro control.

GIMP http://gimp.org is all the image manipulation you'll ever need.

Netbeans http://netbeans.org/ is my go-to IDE for Java, C/C++, JavaScript/CSS, Ruby, and PHP. Huge library of plug-in extensions. Re-use the open platform itself for your own GUI apps. Sweet.

Although technically a browser plug-in, FireBug http://getfirebug.com is an indispensable tool for anyone who needs to build or repair web sites. Amazing.

Also love DropBox, a very well executed app for remotely accessing your files from any platform.

VritualBox rox.

I have to disagree with Adobe Reader as a top cross-platform app. It is bloated, slow, and buggy. I find that PDF reading doesn't really need to be cross platform: use Foxit on Windows and Evince on Linux.

Finally, after a long day geeking out on all these wonderful apps, nothing beats a bit of UrbanTerror http://www.urbanterror.info , the addictive 'fun over realism' network shoot'em-up game where you can settle your differences with other Lin/Win/Mac users the old fashioned way.

Preview on OS X is a far better PDF viewer than Acrobat Reader. It doesn't have the features that 90% of users never need, and 99% never need more than once a year.

I wish I could find a viewer as good as Preview on Windows. So I could remove Acrobat Reader.

I will admit that Thunderbird is offered on multiple platforms, but it's UI is hardly slick compared to other clients, such as Outlook.

The UI is entirely workable as an Email client. I like the fact that I can have the profile for FF and TB on a shared drive (accessible to both Win & Linux) so I see the same email (contacts, folders, etc) and bookmarks on either OS. I do have a minor issue with Lightning when switching between OSes.

Angry IP Scanner.

Just a brilliant tool. Can't top the price either.

Wish I'd remembered that one too. Also so bloody awesome.

Linux users are stuck using the web-based app for evernote, so if you have no internet connection, you're out of luck taking any notes or looking for old notes