Things are really heating up for third party utilities that extend popular cloud computing services in interesting and useful ways. Just days after I blogged aboutInsync, a sync and backup service that piggybacks on Google cloud storage, I've learned about a new free utility called Automate Your Dropbox that builds on that popular online storage solution.
Automate Your Dropbox looks truly useful and it nicely highlights the benefits of Dropbox's extensibility capabilities because that allows third parties to make the service even better. What it does is automatically process a variety of file types in Dropbox and perform actions on them. Compatible file types include images, text files, PDFs and more. But it's in the "action" department that Automate Your Dropbox gets really interesting. According to the company, here's the list of things you can automate:
Documents
... Convert to PDF
... Summarize
... Translate
... PDF to TXT
... Upload to Slideshare
... Sign PDF (electronic signature)
Pictures
... Upload to Facebook
... Upload to Flickr
... Downscale
... Rotate image
... Write text on image
... Photo effect
... Stamp a logo on the image
... Stamp a map on the image
... Stamp a "dislike" on the image
Any file
... Email
... Zip file
... Save it to another Dropbox-folder
... Rename
... Upload to FTP-Server
... Encrypt file
... Decrypt file
Send info
... Tweet
... Set Facebook status file
To use this utility, you logon to your personal Dropbox account via Automate your Dropbox and then select a folder for automation. Then, you can provide one or more actions that will run against the files in that folder. Once processing is complete, you'll see the results in a new subfolder called Processed.
I'm not a Dropbox user, but this looks useful. Hopefully with Microsoft opening up its Windows Live services to further extensibility, we'll see solutions like this appear for Windows Live SkyDrive as well.
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