So continuing on my SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro kick, I want to focus today on why having an API in SkyDrive gives extra value and opens up many opportunities. Here’s a short list.
BoxCryptor
BoxCryptor provides secure encryption for your files. They work with all the major vendors (SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox) This works because of the SkyDrive API. It does mean you have to use their files system but a sync is setup for you.
IFFTT
So ifftt is the ultimately scripting tool. They use a conceptual view to get this done. You have a channel (SkyDrive, email, WordPress, facebook, Evernote, etc) and with different channels you can create recipes. The combination can be extremely powerful. As a matter of fact, shortly after I press the publish button on this blog, both twitter and various linked in accounts will auto-publish a summary to the respective accounts. With SkyDrive, you have a built in channel. That opens up some possibilities like:
Of course, that’s just a smattering of options.
SkyDrive OCR
Even other Microsoft tools take advantage of this. On August 28th, Microsoft announced they were using Bing’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to extract text from pictures.
Now that the SkyDrive team has partnered with the Bing team to add OCR to its feature line-up, its users, too, will reap similar benefits. The feature, Microsoft says, will support “most” common picture formats and is now turned on for users whose browser language is set to English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German. The tool will automatically run on all camera roll photos uploaded to SkyDrive.
Attachment.me
Yes, with Attachments.me, you can use their chrome extension to easily grab files to attach, save files to SkyDrive, and do things like automatic filing. It’s probably the workflow and automatic filing capabilities which offer the most value.
Send To
OK, these two examples may not rely on the API but are still cool. First, in Windows 8 you can configure your right click send to menu to include SkyDrive. Alternatively, the sendtosendto extension makes it even easier.
