3 ms·
There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and convertin
by freehunter 9y ago
There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and converting documents.
Sending files to someone else is a problem with a ton of solutions, some of them better than others, but none of them actually solving the problem. Email often has size limits and spam filters block certain attachments. Dropbox is often restricted at most workplaces, and not everyone uses it. It also has size restrictions. USB is the most reliable, but then you get into the whole "it's NTFS formatted which doesn't work on my Linux machine" or it's HFS and I need to use it on Windows" nonsense, plus sending it longer distances takes days through the mail.
But converting documents... guys it's just electricity running through fancy sand. It shouldn't be that hard. I work on software where I'm often connected to a jump server without Office installed on it, and the software expects me to open a spreadsheet for troubleshooting. I was doing some audio recording recently and the hoops I had to jump through to save it as MP3 weren't insurmountable, but still pretty annoying.
And don't get me started on the Office 2003 spreadsheet that makes me boot up my Windows XP VM to open because the macros won't work on Office 2017. Or when I need to use Visio but there's no Mac version so I have to open my VM too.
And the web just makes it worse... no more software incompatibilities because when software isn't supported anymore, we just shut the servers down and everything is gone forever.
- mtgx 9y agoFor sending files, Firefox Send is pretty cool and straightforward. The files are sent P2P and are E2E encrypted. I'm not sure why Mozilla hasn't added a bookmark for it in Firefox yet. https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/
- gruez 9y ago>The files are sent P2P afaik they're uploaded to s3, not sent p2p.
- weaksauce 9y agoCorrect. Though they are client side encrypted and the key is never sent anywhere.
- neilsimp1 9y agoThey push Pocket more than Send, it seems, and as far as I know Send is actually built by Mozilla, and Pocket isn't. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong).
- TD-Linux 9y agoBoth are built and run by Mozilla. (Pocket started out as a separate company, but then the whole company was bought by Mozilla). That said, Send is the right thing to use here, not Pocket.
- hapnin 9y agoSignal is also an excellent p2p e2e encrypted file sharing service.
- nasredin 9y agoTox. A proper p2p messaging tool. IIRC Signal needs phone numbers. So Mr Manafort should chose Tox over Signal in any future crimes.
- ball_of_lint 9y agoKeybase has a pretty great solution for this. They allow you to upload files sent to anyone based on a popular public account name, so freehunter@hackernews for example. Then once that user makes a keybase account, they can access any files attached to accounts they link to their keybase. https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs has more info
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 9y agoDocument incompatibility is an entire industry. If you could convert Office documents easily, you wouldn't need so many office licenses.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- imglorp 9y agoWhat's up with reading Visio documents on OSX anyway? Why should that be so hard? What business decision drove not supplying Visio with the Office stuff on Mac anyway? They give you Excel, Word, OneNote, PPT etc but not that.
- metalliqaz 9y agoVisio was a separate product by a separate company until well after Office was established. Then MS bought it and (sorta) integrated it into the Office suite. I'm betting that Visio is still very different under the hood compared to the rest of Office.
- herodotus 9y agoActually, converting PDF to a file format is very non-trivial. The problem is that the PDF typically retains none of the semantic structure of the original file. Yes, I know there are converters to Word, none of which are perfect, but in each case the people who wrote the converters had to do a lot of work. PDF is all about geometry. So even the characters in a word do not have to be together in the PDF content stream. (I worked extensively on semantic reconstruction of PDF documents before I retired.)
- m-p-3 9y agoI wish more PDF creation softwares would allow to embed the original document within, like how LibreOffice does it.