The Dropbox for 64-bit Mac OS X app is not available as a separate download, and instead users need to just download the unified installer, which will detect the bit architecture of the machine, and install the appropriate one automatically. Most of us know that Dropbox is a cloud storage service that syncs files in a folder on your Mac with your account in the cloud. There is, however, a great deal more to Dropbox than just storing.

One of the most popular bits of code around the Macworld offices is. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve reviewed programs that take advantage of it, and we’ve even. But we’ve never reviewed Dropbox itself.

So with, it’s about time we did. And given that it’s free (more on that below), it’s about as good a candidate for Mac Gems as there is. Put simply, Dropbox is an amazingly useful combination of a Web service and a Mac OS X program that work together to make your data accessible from anywhere and to keep it synchronized between your computers. Once you’ve installed the Dropbox application and set up a Dropbox account, anything you place in a special Dropbox folder on your Mac is automatically copied to the Dropbox servers, as well as to any other Macs you’ve set up with that Dropbox account. Similarly, whenever you make a change to data in your Dropbox folder on one Mac, those changes are quickly—almost immediately, as long as you have an active Internet connection—reflected in your Dropbox account on the Web and in the Dropbox folders on your other computers.

The current versions of Canon’s tethering software packages EOS Utility 2 and EOS Utility 3 (for the 1Dx, 5DMK3 and 7DMk2) and their RAW processor Digital Photo Professional are not compatible with the latest version of Mac OS X 10.10 aka Yosemite.I’ve spoken to several Canon technical representatives and public relations people who are quietly aware of the issue.

Dropbox's systemwide menu If this sounds a bit like the iDisk feature of Apple’s MobileMe service, that’s because it’s similarexcept that Dropbox is fast and reliable. Dropbox is also more secure than iDisk, as files stored on the Dropbox servers are encrypted and are transferred using SSL. Dropbox is also smarter about copying files: It transfers smaller files before larger ones, copies only the parts of each file that have changed, and compresses all data for the trip. And Dropbox is better about handling sync conflicts—if the same document is modified on two computers at the same time, Dropbox keeps both copies, adding a “conflicted” message to the name of one. If this is all Dropbox did, it would be immensely useful for keeping data in sync between Macs and for making them accessible from any computer with a Web browser. For example, I personally use my Dropbox folder for storing all my in-progress documents, letting me work on those documents from any of my Macs. I can also access those documents using the for iPhones and iPads, and I can even edit them on my iOS devices using apps such as the.

In addition, many Mac programs, such as and, can use Dropbox to ensure all your Macs have the same settings and data; and because your Dropbox folder is a standard Finder folder, you can use Automator or a utility such as to automate task across your Macs. But Dropbox does more—much, much more. For starters, the Dropbox servers automatically save past versions of each synced file, letting you restore any version from the past 30 days using your account on the Dropbox Website. (You can access this feature quickly by right-clicking or Control-clicking a file in your Dropbox folder and choosing Dropbox -> View Previous Versions from the Finder’s contextual menu.) If you’ve got a Pro account—more on that below—you can opt for the Pack-Rat feature, which lets you restore any past version of a Dropbox-synced file, even those versions more than 30 days old. But perhaps the most useful Dropbox extras relate to sharing your data, both publicly and privately. For starters, you can share any file within the Public folder inside your Dropbox folder by simply giving someone a special URL for that file. Although you can get this link using the Dropbox Website, the easier way is to simply right-click (Control-click) the file in the Finder and choose Dropbox -> Copy Public Link from the contextual menu.