My boys over at “Elevate”:https://www.elevatevc.com had me thinking for a bit about a solid way to upload large files for their clients. I know…FTP, right? Nope. You guys know clients! Some clients know how to FTP but not everyone.

I toyed around with the PHP settings in the CMS but I couldn’t open it up to the large file sizes their clients sometimes use. Also, with HTTP you always run the risk of the client hitting refresh or closing the browser.

The thought came up to use Flash. Well, for all of those nay-sayers who claim Flash breaks the browser paradigm…I agree here. The upload happening on top of HTTP in a small side widget may be confusing since they would still be able to do other things on the page (ie – which opens them up to (again…) refreshing or closing the browser.

So, while I was at MAX I thought of a clean way to do it.

I introduce you to UploadIt (an Adobe AIR desktop app).

This is a lil’ utility which allows you to upload files to any web server you want. It DOES NOT use FTP. What you do is set a URL to an upload script. In this script you can do anything you want after the file is upload (ie – add the file reference to the database, create thumbnails, etc). This is exactly what Elevate needs. I’m not sure if it’ll work for them yet or not but I know I’m going to be using it. 😀

To upload (after a script url is set), you just drag/drop any file of any type to the app (which the above icon is exactly what sits on your desktop). The folder will show an open state and when files are dropped you get progress bars (with a filename label) for each file. When the upload is done the progress bars fade away and any other upload will slide up.

Anyways…I built it last night and touched it up a bit today. I want to get a few design elements locked down (namely the upload script url “form” [just one field really] and the progress bars) first. This app will most likely be free…pretty sure it will be but don’t be mad at me if I charge 5 bucks. 😉 lol j/k

These are the types of things you will start seeing from Katapult though…products, products, products!