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Crowdfunded Project News: The best of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the rest
Every week, TUAW provides readers with an update on what new or significant crowdfunded Apple-related projects are in the news. This update is designed to give readers a heads-up on projects they might find interesting enough to back. Note that we're not covering those "projects" on Indiegogo where people are trying to get someone else to cough up money for a new computer or tablet... If a project reaches at least 80 percent of total funding and provides us with review material, we may choose to write a detailed post about it. This week we seem to have a plethora of projects from Kickstarter to cover, so I'll be skipping Indiegogo until next time. From Kickstarter: OK, Lupo. You guys say that your project is much more than just another "lost and found device." We've seen other projects that do the same things -- find your stuff, act as a remote -- but we'll believe you. Although I'm starting to get burned out by these devices, there appears to be a market hungry for tiny Bluetooth dongles that will help you find stuff. 18 percent backed with 35 days to go. Those smart kids at B&A Studio in Houston, TX have a new dock idea up their sleeves. Arq is billed as a modular nesting dock that works with any smartphone or tablet and multiples thereof. Very cool looking aluminum dock that is 30 percent funded, and has 43 days to go with its campaign. Would you believe it also works with cases on your iOS devices? We think you're gonna make it, Arq! And speaking of docks and/or mounts for iPhone and iPad, I figured I'd better cover the Léaf Mount before my inbox is inundated with a few hundred more emails about it. It is a collapsible and transportable mount from Tajudeen Bisiriyu and Léaf, Inc that is about 36 percent funded with 50 days to go in its campaign. I have to admit that I like the looks of the Léaf Mount: How cool is the idea of a game (Mac, Wii U, Linux and PC) that has astronauts, architects, and scientists on the development team? Space Pioneers from Space Enigma Studios gives you the chance to "Build vast colonies and cities. Explore the many unknowns of our universe!" This project needs your support, though -- at this point, Space Pioneers only has about 20 percent funding with just 12 days to go. Now, you see the Léaf Mount above? Well, another similar stand that I've received tons of emails about is the Plinth. It's billed as a universal tablet stand, it's collapsible and transportable, and it's 52 percent of the way toward total funding with just over a month to go in the campaign. Here it is, folded up and sharing some space with a pair of EarPods in a carry bag: Last but not least is the Sparkbeats iPhone case. This is really pretty cool -- a case that illuminates your case with the help of the iPhone's flash to notify you of incoming calls or other notifications. With three days to go in the Kickstarter campaign, Sparkbeats has blown by its goal with almost 145 percent funding. If you're aware of any other crowdfunded Apple-related projects, be sure to let us know about them through the Tip Us button at the upper right of the TUAW home page for future listing on the site.
Arq cloud backup adds low-cost Amazon Glacier support
If you back up your Mac to Amazon S3, you may be familiar with Arq online backup for Mac. Arq (US$29) enables you to store your data to your personal Amazon Web Services account. All charges incurred stay between you and S3; Haystack Software never sees your data or your billing. The backups use an open documented format with encryption that you control. You can even grab individual files from your backups on-the-go using the free iOS client. Amazon Glacier Now, Arq has added support for Amazon Glacier. A lower-cost alternative to S3, Glacier lets you store data at a fraction of the price, e.g. $0.01/GB/month vs $0.125/GB/month. (These rates do vary somewhat based on bulk use and other factors.) Glacier was designed for rarely accessed data with flexible retrieval times. Instead of instant access, you request a "job" that typically completes within a few hours. This allows Amazon to trade-off access loads for price. You pay less but you may have to wait for your data. This makes Glacier the perfect budget solution for items that you want protected but that you rarely access such as baby pictures, old blog archives, completed work projects and so forth. You choose the destination for each folder you back up, selecting either S3 or Glacier. Arq's backup set list indicates where each item get backed up to. Here, the destination for this iPhoto library is Glacier. Arq provides incremental backup support, only updating changes like Time Machine does. It runs a background daemon that monitors the folders you've selected. Overall, you choose whether to back up every hour or every day. From your point of view, there's no real difference in backing up to S3 or Glacier. You simply choose which destination you wish to use. Arq and Your Budget Arq is sensitive to your budget needs for both S3 and Glacier backups, providing excellent consumer feedback and planning. For S3, you tell it how much you wish to spend per month on data storage. Arq trims away older backup versions to stay within that budget. With Glacier, you choose when and how to download data back from the Amazon servers so your expenditures stay low. You don't specify an exact budget number with Glacier the way you do with S3, and there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, Glacier is way cheaper overall. So there's not as much of a compelling motivation for enforcing stored-data limits the way you do with S3 in Arq. You can send up a lot more data and it's not going to kill you financially. Second, Glacier imposes early deletion penalties that can add unneeded costs to your monthly bill. Arq knows that you'll want to avoid that. For Glacier, instead, you budget by choosing how quickly you want to restore. Glacier uses a tiered retrieval fee. You pay based on your peak hourly retrieval rate over a month. If you need data fast, you pay for it. So Arq lets you tweak your download speed to limit how much this fee will be. Lower the speed and your retrieval fee for the month goes down as well. Tiered retrieval fees don't apply to S3. With S3, you can grab data whenever and however you need it. Your costs reflect standard S3 data transfer rates. You may restore on a file-by-file basis or recover entire folders. Conclusions Arq's 3.0 update is a terrific addition to an already excellent tool. If you haven't already checked out Arq, you can test it out free for 30 days. It offers a great "bring your own storage" solution that leverages Amazon's S3 and Glacier web services. Glacier support is now live. Existing users can upgrade to 3.0 through a $15 in-app upgrade. Choose "Check for Updates" from the Arq menu.
Apple's steps toward backup in the cloud tread lightly on third-party developers
Jenna Wortham of the New York Times wrote, "How do you know if you've created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business." That's a pretty common reaction to Monday's WWDC keynote, and the shock and awe was not limited to iPhone apps. On Friday, TUAW mused about what Apple's return to cloud services might mean to backup-in-the-cloud developers. On Monday, Apple introduced iCloud, a way to push your music, photos, calendars and other data to the cloud so that it's "always accessible from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac or PC," with instant access to that data across all your devices. While it does not appear that this service is any kind of substitute for a comprehensive backup strategy, it does show Apple continuing to move in the direction of taking charge of users' data protection needs. TUAW was curious how third-party cloud developers would react to Apple's entry into an arena that might step on the toes of their current offerings. We talked to the developers of Dolly Drive, CrashPlan and Arq to ascertain their reactions to iCloud. What we found was this: iCloud isn't about to drive Mac backup solutions out of business, the way that the keynote announcements challenged products like Readability, Instapaper and Sparrow. Dolly Drive Dolly Drive provides online backups using Apple's Time Machine technology for Mac OS X. Its cloud storage solutions merge the Mac Time Machine user experience with offsite safety to guard against a calamity that takes down your local backups as well as your computer. TUAW contacted Dolly Drive to see what they had to say about Apple's iCloud. Dolly Drive's spokesperson Leigh Kessler told TUAW, "iCloud is an example of Apple ingenuity and excites us as a solution for sharing among Apple devices. But we hope Mac users are not confused into thinking that iCloud's convenience is a substitute for true data backup and we think Apple would agree. Time Machine is still the most comprehensive way to protect and recover everything on your Mac and Dolly Drive is still the only way to do that in the cloud." Kessler provided the following table to differentiate Dolly Drive from iCloud. iCloud lets you iCloud doesn't Dolly Drive will see all your itunes library from all your mac and apple devices stream a limited number of photos from your iOS devices onto your mac and Apple TV sync documents that have been integrated into the iCloud framework. Backup a set of items that are on your iOS devices provide Mac desktop or laptop backup provide automatic iPhoto sync backup for music that is deleted from your music library backup or sync of documents that don't comply with iCloud backup all and any OS X computer file to Dolly Grid cloud storage recover from a crash with Dolly Clone backup from anywhere your computer is multiple times a day CrashPlan CrashPlan provides an always-on cloud-based solution for online data backup. Instead of using a Time Machine interface, CrashPlan runs in the background of your Mac performing regular updates to remote servers. CrashPlan's Mike Evangelist told TUAW, "We are still absorbing the many facets of Apple's announcements, but our feeling is generally positive. First and foremost [iCloud] will validate cloud options for the average user. In a sense [it's] assuring non-technical people that the cloud is nothing to fear." He explained, "As is typical with Apple's solutions, iCloud is stripped down to a few essential features. We see it as an opportunity to continue to provide robust, cross-platform solutions for home and business users. Small and large businesses have needs that are clearly not addressed by iCloud, including security, monitoring and management, the ability to run local servers, and a lot more. That's where CrashPlan PRO excels." Arq and SyncPhotos Stefan Reitshamer is the developer behind Arq, whose backup solution is built around Amazon's S3 cloud-based data storage infrastructure. He was intrigued by what Apple's new technology means. "Apple is trying to get rid of the file concept in OS X, just like iOS. There are no files in iOS -- there are only apps and their data. In the keynote we never saw a Finder window or a file -- only the new Launchpad. Likewise, the iCloud backup stuff is built into apps. So unless all your apps have added iCloud integration, iCloud backup isn't going to suffice." "The syncing stuff looked very single-user," Reitshamer continued, "aside from the calendar sharing. The photo stream stuff was cool but it only synched to a single person's devices. You still can't do what my SyncPhotos app does (sync new photos from someone else's computer). It's not surprising. They've never been very interested in groupware; they're usually more focused on the individual user." Conclusions While iCloud approaches the notion of moving your data to the cloud, it still has a long way to go if Apple decideds to take it to a full backup solution. iCloud will ship with 5 GB of free storage (not counting purchased items like music and apps), with additional increments likely purchasable by the user.
