AppFlow

Cloud storage appears to be the ‘in thing’ at the moment.  We’ve reviewed Cloud, an excellent example of this movement.  Others that spring to mind are Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs.  The advantages of cloud storage are easy to see – backups of your files, and easy access from any system.

I’m going to pop back, for this review, to Google Docs.  In principle, an excellent idea!  Cloud computing at it’s finest.  A web based office suite with cloud storage and online sharing enabled.  For me, however, moving to Google Docs has always seemed a bit daunting.

To be fair to Google, they have made uploading files to Google Docs as simple as possible without providing a desktop uploader.  (The fact that they don’t provide a desktop uploader is an inconvenience for another day!)

Introducing Cyberduck

Cyberduck is, primarily, an FTP client.  You cannot currently use a simple FTP to upload to GoogleDocs, and other FTP clients such as Flow don’t support Google Docs.  Cyberduck, however, does!

This means that you have all of the benefits of a drag and drop desktop uploader, but all of the compatibility and cloud editing benefits of Google Docs.

Set Up

Setting up is easy, and surprisingly straight forward.  You can simply add Google Docs to the list of bookmarks, just as you would an FTP protocol.

Uploading

Uploading is a simple as you would expect from any FTP uploader.  Simply drag and drop one or more files onto Cyberduck, and it will upload them to Google Docs.

Once your file(s) has been uploaded, you can view it as normal in Google Docs.

Conclusion

Cyberduck may not be the most feature rich application as an FTP client.  I hardly ever use FTP, so wouldn’t be the right person to look into this.  What it does do for me, however, is make uploading to Google Docs less of a chore, and could potentially make this resource more accessible to users with large numbers of files.

Best of all, Cyberduck is completely free!