Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling rather delighted because we have one of those delightful demos where I
started looking at a piece of software that I thought would solve one thing and it turns
out it does a whole bunch of extra things.
The genesis of this particular story is all about connected devices.
A couple of weeks ago on the channel, we posted a video on how to take desktop video and post
it to Instagram.
I had to go through all these machinations of taking the video, creating it on my computer,
emailing it to myself so I could get it on my iPhone so that I can post it to Instagram.
Well, the community came to my rescue, including Javier who mentioned an app called Pushbullet
which he really likes which allows him to push content to his smartphones from his desktop
computer.
I thought I’ll take a look at that.
I took a look at it and oh my gosh, it does so much more than what it might seem on the
surface.
It actually makes our connected devices connected properly.
So Pushbullet is the topic du jour on DottoTech.
So a special big shout out and thanks to the community.
I love it when you folks give me ideas for demos.
It takes me a couple weeks usually to take time and look at them but when I do and I
find a gem, boy, we all benefit.
Thank you so much, Javier, for this particular one, Pushbullet.
Also, we’ve had actually several of you mention Pushbullet in the past on the channel.
But here’s the story behind Pushbullet.
Pushbullet is really operating system agnostic.
It works in every operating system and it allows you to connect your devices to each
other and be able to send information back and forth between those devices.
Now sure, we can do that with email and we can do it within silos.
For example, if you’re in the Apple world and you’re going to be using Apple’s cloud
services, you can share content back and forth in the Apple world.
We could also do it at Dropbox.
But we’re kind of cobbling together systems by doing all of this.
Pushbullet is a single app that runs unified on all of our platforms and allows them to
all share pretty seamlessly between each other.
I think you’ll be pretty impressed when you take a look at this, especially those
of you who live in a hybrid world, who live in a multi-operating system world.
So I’m going to show you this running on Android, in Chrome and on a Mac all in this
demo.
Are you excited?
Well, you should be.
So Pushbullet is an app that runs on your computer.
It’s an app that runs on your smartphones that you download from whatever app store
you happen to have for whatever your smart phone or tablet is but it also acts as a browser
plug-in.
I’m just going to take you quickly through the installation process on the Mac because
it’ll tell us a little bit about what it does when installing it and then also to show
you that it’s really not all that much of a challenge to set up.
But you do have to kind of think your way through it.
So I’m just installing the app here on my desktop computer.
I’ve already installed it on my notebook computer and on my two devices.
I have it running here on both my iPhone 6+ and my Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, which I’m
playing with and I quite like I must say.
So it’s installed.
Let’s open it up.
Let’s have a look at the setup process because you can log-in using credentials, using online
credentials such as Facebook or your Google identity.
I’ve signed up for it with all with my Facebook identity.
As it goes, it recognizes that I’ve already set it up and that I have it on several different
devices because I’ve signed up for it with my Facebook identity.
So it was this easy to have it set up.
So let’s take a look at my environment that I have.
Now the whole idea is going to be to actually quickly share files and other things between
the devices.
So I have it set up on my Mac Pro, on my Samsung smartphone.
I have it setup running as a browser extension because you could plug it in and you can install
it as a browser extension in all the main browsers or as an app.
I have it set up as a browser extension on my notebook computer.
I also have it set up as an app on my notebook computer and I have it set up on my iPhone.
So you could see I’ve got it set up in everything.
Now the cool thing is depending how deep you want to get in the pool, you can set this
up to basically just share files back and forth or that sort of stuff or we could actually
go in even deeper and have it working at an operating system level where it’s actually
copying your clipboard back and forth and that sort of stuff.
Actually before we start sharing files back and forth, let me actually show you the little
setups in the Preferences.
So I’m here in Pushbullet.
I’m going to go on to the Pushbullet Menu, into Preferences and there we can see the
different settings that we can choose to set up with Pushbullet.
Now the most important ones in allowing you to enable notifications which basically allow
you to be notified of any activity in Pushbullet by putting it in our top menu bar—I don’t
mind that.
I’m going to put that in.
It uses a few sets of resources but it shouldn’t be too arduous.
I hide it in the dock when the applications closed.
That’s fine.
Universal copy and paste is one that I haven’t enabled.
It sounds very cool but I’m concerned as to whether or not it will work seamlessly
because it’s quite complicated when it does.
This is what I was talking about as far as copying something in your operating system
level using copy and paste and having it that snippet copied and available on your mobile
device.
I think that’s going to use a fair bit of bandwidth and I just don’t trust it.
I don’t really see the value, to be honest.
I could see it occasionally for maybe a password or something like that but I don’t see the
value myself so I’m just going to leave that turned off because I think it could be
trouble.
I’ll just close that down but actually, let’s just go back in I want to show you
the last of it.
Showing my phones notifications, I’m going to turn that off.
I’ve got that ability built into iOS and I get messaging coming up on my computer screen
of notifications that are on my phone.
I’m not sure I really like that.
I tend to feel like that often causes extra different levels of distraction that I don’t
really need so it’s something that I’m happy to have turned off.
But that’s my personal choice.
And finally if you’ve got that turned on, you have to set it up with iOS and Mac notifications.
So I’m going to leave that turned off.
So that’s the basic setup.
Let’s take a look at how we actually share something back and forth.
So what you do is you just click on the Plus and it almost works like an email system.
You choose whatever of your devices that you’ve set up that you want to push something to.
Now the cool thing is if you have this in your family or with friends, you can push
to other devices.
It just doesn’t have to be your devices but in your address book, you can have other
people’s devices.
I am just going to send this to my mobile phone, which I call Fishport mobile so that’s
addressed there.
This could be to my device.
It could be to anybody else who’s using Pushbullet’s apps if I have their address.
I am now going to now add, this is going to be “Important stuff.”
And if I want to attach a file, I can click here to attach a file, click on the center
of it and now I can could navigate to any document that I want, anything that I want
to include, any graphic, anything like that.
Let’s see.
Do I have a graphic here that I could quickly add?
What’s that one there?
There’s a picture of Susan.
Let’s just make a little mail GIF.
There it is, a little image that I want to send and I want to use.
So I save it there and now I push it.
Now what should happen is it’s being now sent to my smartphone and if I take a look
on my smartphone, there it is.
We can see right in my notification screen that I have a graphic that has been sent to
me.
So if I unlock my phone and I go into Pushbullet, we see the app running here.
I can see that I’ve got here, that I can save that photo into my own album and so I’ve
got access to it all here.
Isn’t that awesome?
So it’s that easy to transfer any type of data to our smartphone.
Now where it starts to get really cool is when we start thinking about sharing information
between our mobile devices.
For example, I live in a hybrid world where I have some Android and I have some iOS devices.
If I want to take something and I want to send it to my Android device, I don’t have
to use email.
I can use Pushbullet to send from my iOS or from my desktop computer or from my mobile.
So if I want to send it to my Samsung, to my Galaxy tab here, I’m going to call it
cross promotion because that’s exactly what we’re doing here.
Okay, so we’ve got that going and again I can attach anything, including my location.
This button here will actually include a map with my location, which is an interesting
way to go about things.
I can send links.
I can send files.
I’ll send this crazy picture of my cat.
It will take a few seconds to go through but the other cat was just laying down like it
was a rug the other day.
So I’m going to send that and I say push it.
Now it’s uploading the file and it’s going to be pushing it through to my Samsung tab.
So let’s jump over and let’s take a look at the Galaxy now.
Here is my Galaxy tab running, and if I go to Pushbullet here—this could be any Android
device—there just sent moments ago is the picture that I sent.
Now let’s think about this for a second.
Look at what we’ve done.
We’ve taken information from our desktop or notebook computer in any operating system.
We’ve sent photos, files, music, and web clippings.
We’ve sent it from our desktop or notebook to our mobile device or exchanged information
between our mobile devices, again operating system-agnostic, going from iOS to Android,
Android to iOS, iOS to Windows.
It doesn’t matter.
We can exchange it all back and forth using this simple and it turns out free app called
Pushbullet.
I think it’s a winner.
It certainly makes all of our connected devices connected, does it not?
That’s it for today.
I hope that you found this video to be useful and I imagine a lot of you are going to try
and download this and start playing with it.
Let me know what you think about it.
Please give us comments below and let us know what you think of this app and if you have
any other suggestions, I’m all ears and more than happy to create a demo if it’s
something that I think that the entire community is going to be interested in.
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That’s all the time we have today.
I hope that you found today useful.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!