We are happy to announce the launch of our brand new Google Apps edition of Attachments.me. It includes a couple of very useful features.

Choose services for your organization

Now you can choose which services you want used at your company. If you only want people in your company using Google Drive with Attachments.me, and not Dropbox, then simply turn off Dropbox and it will no longer be an option.

Quickly deploy Attachments.me to your entire company

Now you can quickly get everyone in your company using Attachments.me. Simply install the Google Apps edition and choose the users and groups you’d like to invite. They’ll receive an email with a simple link to get started.

Box Sanctioned

We’ve launched our new Google Apps edition along with BoxWorks. Shutting services on and off was a highly requested feature by our Box users. With the release, Attachments.me is now an officially Box sanctioned Gmail integration. We’re super happy to continue partnering with Box to bring a highly secure way to integrate Gmail and Box. You can read about it more at our special Box landing page.

Available now

No matter which cloud services you use, you can get our Google Apps edition now, from the Google Apps Marketplace here.

This is just the start of our offering for your entire business. As always, we’d love to hear about what you need from us. Reach out!

The Attachments.me Team

We’re happy to announce the release of our newest iPhone application. There are a couple of great new features in it.

Multiple Accounts

We now support having multiple accounts logged in at once. You can add and switch between them by clicking on the side menu and clicking on your email address. The ‘+’ button let’s you add new accounts.

Advanced rules

We’ve also brought our more advanced rules into the iPhone. Now you can setup rules based on filetype, sender, subject and filename.

We hope you like it!

The Attachments.me Team

Today we’re happy to announce the addition of SkyDrive to the options for cloud storage in Attachments.me.

We’ve been talking to the Microsoft SkyDrive team for awhile and got really excited about the stuff they’re doing with SkyDrive and its tight integration with Office Web Apps. Now, using Attachments.me, you can setup a rule to have all Word documents go to SkyDrive, where you’d be able to open them right into a web version of Word.

The integration is available now in both our Chrome and Firefox browser extensions. If you’d like to add SkyDrive to an existing account, you can click on our menu at the top right of Gmail, and click on ‘Manage account’, then click on ‘Cloud Services’. It should look like this:

Click ‘Connect’ next to SkyDrive, follow the prompts and you’ll be all setup! Now you can have all your documents sent to SkyDrive and share files directly from it.

Along with adding SkyDrive, you may also notice we’ve completely revamped our attachment search. Finding an old attachment in your Gmail has never been easier. Take a look at this new interface:

The new search is incredibly powerful. You can see a full tutorial on using it here: Attachment Search Tutorial

We hope you like all the new stuff. We want to be the ultimate tool for people sharing files in email. We’ve got a lot more coming, but as always, we love to hear from you.

Thanks,

The Attachments.me Team

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
 - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Last night we released a new version of the Chrome extension with a cleaned up compose bar.

Here is what it looked like before:

And here’s the new one:

We feel the new design is much easier to understand. Unfortunately, this meant we needed to remove the “Save attachments from replies” feature. Looking at our stats we saw this was a very rarely used feature and, in our constant effort to make a great user experience, decided to remove it.

We will be reaching out to our users who were using that feature to try to find a way we might be able to introduce it back, in a way that is less obtrusive. 

We hope you like the new (cleaner) compose. As always, we love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,

The Attachments.me Team

Today is a happy day for our iPhone users. We’re happy to announce a completely redesigned version of our iPhone application.

Take a look at the new Inbox view…

Now all your attachments are pulled together by conversation they were received in. This makes it much easier to know what file you have found. You can quickly save them to the cloud and forward them in an email.

This, along with improved search and a better design through out. You can download the update from the app store here: Attachments.me in the App Store

We hope you like the improvements. We’ve got a lot more planned, but as always, we love to hear your ideas.

Forever working to make files and email play nice,

The Attachments.me Team

We’ve been working hard to make it easy for you to discover and share files in your email. Recently we rolled out a couple of new features that we wanted to show you.

Quickly share files

We’ve added a whole new way for you to share your files in Gmail. Now you can send files to Dropbox, Box or Drive, and share them, without leaving your email workflow. You can even send a 100MB file if you want. Check out our video below to see the feature in action:

Share folders

Need to share all the assets for a project? How about all the photos from the cottage?  We’ve got you covered. Now instead of just being able to share a link to a file from Dropbox, Box or Drive, you can share an entire folder. Simply use our share functionality as you normally do, but now you can select a folder and share it.

Advanced Rules

You may have already found this one, but we took all your feedback from our initial rules and put it into the newest version. Now you can do things like say “send all attachments from the domain ‘foundrygroup.com’ to Dropbox” or “send any file that has the word Receipt in it to Box”. All of this can be found in your usual ‘Manage Rules’ dialog.

We’re proud to announce newly added support for Google Drive. Now you can easily store all your email attachments to Google Drive and have them accessible from the cloud. It all works right from within Gmail!

Google Drive support comes in addition to existing support for Dropbox and Box. Think of Attachments.me as Switzerland for the cloud.

The feature is supported in our chrome extension, iPhone support will follow shortly.

Attachments.me Chrome Extension

Getting Started

In order to enable Google Drive from the Chrome extension:

• Click on Manage Cloud Services from the Attachments.me pull-down menu.

• Click the Connect link on the Google Drive service.

• Following Google’s instructions, grant Attachments.me access to your documents.

Setup Powerful Automations, Get More Organized!

You can define rules that take actions on your behalf as emails arrive in your inbox. Rules give you a powerful mechanism for automatically storing attachments to Google Drive folders.

Painlessly Share Large Files

Once you’ve stored attachments to Google Drive, you can insert them as links in outgoing emails.  

• When composing a new email, choose Insert:  Google Drive file then select the file you’d like to share. 

• the file will be automatically set to the shared permission on google drive, so recipients of your email can access the link.

Welcome to the Family

We’re excited to have Google Drive joining the Attachments.me family. It’s been a common feature request, and rightfully so. It adds a ton to the product, bringing us one step further towards our goal of making email awesome.

— Larry Kang (@l_kang)

EDIT 5/4/12: real men can admit it when they’re wrong— I’ve retooled my approach to use a category on UIColor, hopefully making it easier to use.

I want to tell all you iOS devs about the minorly fantastic thing I’ve created. Here’s you:

“…Y’know, I wish I didn’t have to ALWAYS create colors in my app using an RGB float value. Why can’t I just use hex values? Apple put methods into Objective-C for nearly everything, didn’t they think this one would be a common use case? Also, I don’t like the way I maintain the colors in my app, but I don’t have a real knockout solution. Globals are lame, I don’t want to define the colors in my header, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to maintain a dozen points where I change the screen background to a certain shade of red. Dan, what should I do???”

Fear not, fine citizen… I’m here to help.

I’ve made this here color factory that allows one to  create UIColor objects from hex! It doesn’t mind playing rough: 0Xffcc54, #F00BA4, 345667… it doesn’t care, they all work. It creates the colors from a class level method, you don’t even need to instantiate my stupid factory to use it!!! Seriously, it’s a very simple singleton factory— you’re gonna love it.

Here’s how to use it to generate a color somewhere in your app:

Easy right? So that’s how I initially dreamed it up, but I soon found that it became cumbersome to create colors a billion times. I needed some way to access global colors, but many ways of doing that are cumbersome and gross. Here’s what I came up with: I made a singleton object that instantiates a bunch of user defined colors and holds onto them for use across your entire app. This object gets created the first time you call it and just goes wherever you tell it.

I love tacos, can we talk about them for a minute?

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a UIViewController in your app called TacoViewController. This view is responsible for displaying a collection of UIImageViews representing a taco in some view controller, but you aren’t exactly sure which shade of brown you should display for the carne asada. 

Here’s how you use Color Factory to make your job easier:

Bring Color Factory into your project.An easy way to do that would be cloning my repository HERE and drag ColorFactory.h and ColorFactory.m into your project in Xcode.You’ll notice I’ve loaded a sample scheme in, you can delete that nonsense— it’s just there to show you the way.

Here’s what your ColorFactory.h should resemble:

And then in your .m, initialize your colors in your shared factory like so:

You’ve got your color palette created now, let’s learn how to use it.

here’s SomeViewController.h, where we have 4 UIImageView objects representing the various layers of a taco and a ColorFactory object for our palette:

Finally, we come to the implementation of SomeViewController

…where we initialize our color palette to the shared ColorFactory resource. We then use these colors to fill our taco images with the right colors. Check it out:

I don’t have any taco apps on the market right now, and I don’t think I would create a taco from a collection of UIImageViews but this hopefully gets my point across. We use this class here at Attachments.me for our iPhone app, it really helps to keep text, table cells, backgrounds and so on all cohesive with a singular design. To create the colors, I modified a method written in one of WrightsCS’s posts on stackoverflow. I’m pretty sure this method of singleton creation is thread safe as well.

Questions/comments/solutions/complaints/quandaries/dilemmas?

Once again, the git repo is located here ->Color Factory Repository    

—Dan (@DanReedx86)

  
BONUS: People like cats in the internet, here’s a photo of one of mine. This is Sukoshi, he’s a gemini from the Detroit area and he loves to eat cat food, pea pods, and spiders. Hobbies include being afraid of everything, chasing bugs, and laying in the sun.

Attachments.me is based in the Mission District of San Francisco. In terms of hipsterism, according to a 2010 national survey, the Mission falls between Portland Oregon and Los Angeles. As a result, building a work environment attractive to today’s Macbook-wielding, tech-savvy hipster is integral to our hiring strategy.

The aptly named startup Hipster famously offered a year’s supply of PBR, as incentive for would be employees. This gesture might have worked in 2011, but with today’s level of competition, more is needed. Creating a hipster-friendly work environment is our utmost priority. I’d like to share some of the steps we’ve taken to achieve this, in hopes that it can benefit other companies striving to do the same.

1. Programming Language Selection is Key

There are three varieties of hipster software developers:

Purists:  Purists believe that software development should be reduced to its simplest, most mathematically sound, rudiments. Common Lisp is an example of a purist programming language.

The Sardonic: The steam-punks of the programming world, they thrive on using programming languages that have fallen out of mainstream appeal. Examples of which include: Turbo Pascal, and Logo (which powers Instagram).

Obscurist: The obscurist is only happy when they’re using programming languages that are on the cutting edge. Node.js is an example of a technology that would have fallen into this category, but frankly it’s getting a bit mainstream now.

As a startup focused on hiring hipsters, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between these three divergent demographics.

At least it was before the advent of Clojure. Clojure combines the appeal of an obscure technology, the purity of Lisp, and the anachronism of Java. Making it the perfect choice for your startup.

2. Think about Making a Barista One of Your Early Hires

For a bootstrapping startup, heads down in the hurly-burly of the software development cycle, a barista might seem like an indulgent hire. Let me tell you, our barista’s name is Stephen, and we don’t regret hiring him for a second. The amount of productivity wasted, wandering to the nearest cafe that serves Blue Bottle Coffee, can be staggering. Furthermore, on days when the expresso is pulling poorly, developers can spiral into a negative mood that further impedes velocity. Hiring an award winning barista can help solve both of these problems. It also provides a workplace perk that your hipster developers will find hard to resist.

3. Choose a Medical Plan that Fits Your Employees

A good medical plan is the keystone to a good work environment. Part of choosing a good medical plan is choosing one that fits your employee demographic. It took us a long time to settle on Fixed Care™ as our health insurance provider, and it was far from the cheapest. Having said that, it provided unique benefits including: coverage for up to four hours of tattoo sessions, per-annum; and $200 worth of eyeglass coverage, regardless of one’s need for prescription.

4. Introduce a Progressive 20% Time

Google is known for introducing the concept of 20% time. Allowing employees to spend one day a week on projects that interest them. We love this concept, and make an effort to avoid putting any restraints on how our employees spend this time. Here’s what some of employees have to say about it:

Jesse: “I love my 20% time, I’ve been spending it building a really sick art bike for next year’s Burning Man.”

Mike: “The mix tapes I’ve been working on have become a huge creative outlet for me. It’s amazing to work somewhere that encourages it.”

Dan: “I think that 20% time used to be way cooler. Every company is doing it now.”

I hope you’ve found these tips useful. I’d love to hear your own hipster hiring strategies, please comment below.

— Ben (@benjamincoe)