15 August 2010
How to Save from iPad to Dropbox - A Task Analysis
08/15/10 10:33 Filed in: Training
As regular readers will already be aware, Forest City Behavior is primarily an Apple Shop. We run Macintosh computers and Apple software for nearly all of our computing needs. This was a decision born in large part out of the discovery, once I had a Mac, that we were spending far, far less time on network and other maintenance issues than we were in our Windows PC days.
Given this, it will likely be no surprise that your humble author found himself in line for an iPad on the day of its release. As much of our work is done on-site, we travel extensively. The iPad presents the opportunity to leave behind the laptop, and as such it considerably lightens the load both in terms of weight and bulk. I rarely need to take my MacBook with me any more.
I absolutely love my iPad, but it is not without it's shortcomings. One of the more glaring deficits is that there is no simple way to save something from one application to a separate location, e.g. the way you would save a document to a hard drive, flash drive, network drive, etc. The iPad's operating system (and, by extension, the iPhone and iPod Touch) only allows applications to save within themselves. There is a Dropbox app for the iPad, but there is no direct way to save from your word processor to that application.
This was a problem for us as we make extensive use of Dropbox for sharing files and ensuring that we have access to what we need from anywhere we may be. As is often the case, there is a workaround, but it's a little geeky and it takes multiple steps. I've explained it to several people, and I'm often surprised at how complicated it is (this is a very non-Apple sort of problem).
However, we are behavior analysts around here, and teaching complicated tasks in a step-by-step fashion is part of our stock in trade, so I thought it would be helpful for folks to have a task analysis on how to accomplish it. That task analysis can be found here, or by clicking the tab for it in our header.
Given this, it will likely be no surprise that your humble author found himself in line for an iPad on the day of its release. As much of our work is done on-site, we travel extensively. The iPad presents the opportunity to leave behind the laptop, and as such it considerably lightens the load both in terms of weight and bulk. I rarely need to take my MacBook with me any more.
I absolutely love my iPad, but it is not without it's shortcomings. One of the more glaring deficits is that there is no simple way to save something from one application to a separate location, e.g. the way you would save a document to a hard drive, flash drive, network drive, etc. The iPad's operating system (and, by extension, the iPhone and iPod Touch) only allows applications to save within themselves. There is a Dropbox app for the iPad, but there is no direct way to save from your word processor to that application.
This was a problem for us as we make extensive use of Dropbox for sharing files and ensuring that we have access to what we need from anywhere we may be. As is often the case, there is a workaround, but it's a little geeky and it takes multiple steps. I've explained it to several people, and I'm often surprised at how complicated it is (this is a very non-Apple sort of problem).
However, we are behavior analysts around here, and teaching complicated tasks in a step-by-step fashion is part of our stock in trade, so I thought it would be helpful for folks to have a task analysis on how to accomplish it. That task analysis can be found here, or by clicking the tab for it in our header.
