It started with a telephone call from my father. He was in desperate need of getting a large file to a client, and was blocked by gmail. The normal course of action he had taken was to upload the file to his website and email the link. Unfortunately, now, Google For Domains hosts all of his content and there is no way to upload a file to his website. There lies the dilemma.
The temporary fix was to host the file for him, but during this process a new idea emerged. “I bet this is a common problem” I thought. So the following weekend I went to work creating SendTool.
SendTool had to be painless, no tedious logins or heavy graphics were in its future. I decided early on to stick to the basics, its really just temporary file storage. What do we really care about here? Well, we need to upload a file. Thats a good start, what else? How about a description of that file, password protection, and a setting for just how temporary the storage will be. Enough brainstorming, time to build it.
Coding the site didn’t take long, but I could definitely have used a graphic designer. I’m an engineer, I think by definition that means I’m horrible with graphics. The site is simple, comprised of only 3 pages. The upload form, the upload complete page, and the download page. The upload form takes all your information and uploads it. The upload complete page gives you a summary of what you uploaded and provides download links for you to distribute. And the download page serves your file to its recipient. With these three pages, I had covered the basics. It was functional.
And so, a new application was born. I sprinkled some Google ads around just so people could be assured the site is absolutely free. Click them if you’d like 
2 comments ↓
Very cool utility! I have been looking for something like this for a long time. I have a fobia with FTP, as every app I’ve tried is a complete nightmare to get up and running with my ISP (my fault I know, but burn a disk and use the postal service has worked for a while). Also limitations in email attachments we have at work are annoying to say the least, 5Mb file size limitations are just plane stupid if you ask me, got a 6Mb file? it won’t let you send it without spliting it in two and sendin 2 emails, arrgh!
Thanks for creating this easy to use app, great stuff!
p.s. Maybe just one suggestion, regarding the password, maybe this could be setup to send automatically to the intended recipient when the “email to” option is selected.
Thanks again.
Mark
Thanks Mark!
I like your automatic email suggestion. The only reason I hesitate to add it is I’m afraid of it being abused by spammers.
The only way I can thing to keep that from happening is by requiring a CAPTCHA prase to be typed in. Which in itself is a hassle, in my opinion.
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