Signing legal documents in the cloud

Did you know that you could sign documents without killing trees?

I found this out when I had a W-4 document to sign for a new job. I got the form in an email and was requested to print, sign and fax the form back to them. I don't have a printer and Kinko's was out of the way. But with a little research, I found an alternative.

Check the laws in your country, but here in the US, it's legal under an act of congress on June 30th, 2000. Yup! And we even have "National ESIGN Day" to celebrate it.

There are many ways to do it, but you basically just import the document into a drawing/painting/photo editing app, sign it with your mouse/touchscreen/trackpad, and then email it back to the concerned party. I used a mish-mash of apps on my iPad, android phone, and in the cloud to accomplish this. Here's a hand howto if you can't figure it out for yourself.

Pillarbox - Get your computer out of the way and just type

If you need to type and you want the computer to just get out of the way, that's what this app does.

Pillarbox is a web app that let's you write. You can set how many words you want to write (for this article I set it at 250 because I didn't want to bore you) or you can set a timer for how long you want to write. It keeps your text in the middle of the screen so you don't have to scroll.

It gives you a black screen with a grey column in the middle and you just type in it.

You can change the colors and font sizes if you want, and if you know CSS, you can change just about everything about the appearance.

It uses HTML 5 offline storage, so the text exists in your browser cache and is saved automatically. To save the text to an external file is to select all, copy and paste it into another app.

The one mark against it is that it only works on Chrome. It is a Chrome app that you get from the Web Store.

Download it here.

Dropbox

My first post here is a review of Dropbox, because there are a lot of cloud applications that rely on it.

In a nutshell, Dropbox let's you store files in the cloud.

Dropbox is “freemium” service that allows you 2GB of storage for free. You can then pay for more space if you want to. Alternately, you can recommmend people, and if they sign up, you can get more space (click here to give me more space :).

Besides being able to store stuff (for free!) in the cloud, it has three really powerful features

It syncs your files across many different platforms, including a computer, smart phone and even the cloud. It will make sure that the latest version of the file is in all the locations and push the latest copy to your computer or phone (or the cloud).

A really remarkably feature is that it can go back in time and recover deleted files, as well as previous revisions. I have a text file (my todo list) that I update sometimes as much as 10 times a day. Dropbox allows me recover up to 35 revisions ago.

Another great feature that is not obvious at first is that allows you to share stuff, not just with other dropbox users, but on the web itself. You just put stuff in the shared folder, and you can you get a URL that you can send someone a link to (like this link).

Dropbox has become something of a standard. There are a ton of applications that will interact with Dropbox on multiple platforms. One app I use all the time on my phone is called todo.txt that interfaces with a file on Dropbox (the above mentioned todo list). It also interfaces with a ton of web apps. I will get into some of the cloud apps in later posts.