Adding Apps to Google Drive

If you are a regular user of Google Docs (sorry Google Drive) you will know how useful it is. What I didn’t know, well didn’t register with me, was the way that you can integrate a whole range and variety of apps making it much easier to create stuff.

On a regular vanilla Google account when clicking Create you see the standard document formats that we are all use to. However at the moment if you look down you can see Connect more apps.

Connect with apps

Click this and you will bring up a new dialogue with lots of different apps.

Connect with apps

I do like Draw.io which makes it very easy to create diagrams.

Draw.io

Movenote is a very nice presentation tool that combines video with a document, making it very simple to create short learning objects.

There is also MindMeister mindmapping.

MindMeister

As all the files are stored in your Google Drive you can access them from any computer with a modern web browser.

I am still exploring the different apps available, but if you are already using an app, drop me a comment about which apps you are using.

Update: Just a quick thank you to Yousef Fouda @YFouda who showed me this at the AOSEC meeting today.

Taking a Google Drive

Google has finally and eventually come through with their cloud storage offering.

Google Drive gives you 5GB of storage and there are apps that allow you to sync your Google Drive with a computer. Having installed the Google Drive on my iMac at home, it appeared to work just like Dropbox.

So will I be changing to Google Drive?

Probably not, in the main as there isn’t an iOS App for Google Drive. There is also, as is to be expected very little support for Google Drive from third party apps as there is for Dropbox. I suspect over time we will see increased support for Google Drive in third party apps, but not sure though. Think how little support there is for Google+ as Google have not yet released the APIs that allow that to happen with Google+, will there be a similar model with Google Drive, or will be made open enough for developers to embed Google Drive into their applications.

At this point I have installed the “drive” and will be using it for some stuff.

My main concern with Google Drive is that it may force Facebook to buy Dropbox…. Now that would really be a disaster!