Hurt Technology

A few months ago I was involved in a WebEx Meeting with a Google employee. After the meeting was over, some of the participants were chatting in the chat area and many of us were curious about the big “G” icon in his dock.

Current Google Drive Icon

Early Google Drive Icon ???

I Skitched a shot of it to show to my buddies later. We asked the presenter and he told us that it was a storage tool that

Google employees could use called G-Drive. Several in the meeting remarked that it was Google’s answer to DropBox.
Well, On April 24, it was released as Google Drive.

As soon as Google Drive became available, I logged in and downloaded it on my iMac. If you haven’t already downloaded Google Drive for your Mac, here are the easy steps and some examples of how to use it.

1. Point your web browser to http://drive.google.com, it doesn’t matter which browser you use. But I like Google Chrome the best for this exercise. Let’s be honest, if you are still using Internet Explorer, you probably aren’t reading this blog… But if you are using Explorer you should want to upgrade your browser anyway so follow the link and get Chrome.
2. On the Google Drive page you may watch the video, I’ve embedded it below if you want to watch it on my site. Click on the “Sign in” button in the top right corner of the page.
   
3. Once you click this link you will be asked to login. This is the standard Google login, you may use your personal @gmail.com email or your Google Apps email address and password.
4. Once you are logged in, you will see all of your Google Docs available in your browser window. (I’ve obscured the name of many of my documents for privacy.) You should also see a prompt to download Google Drive for Mac, if you don’t get the banner you can also click on the less prominent Download Google Drive link at the left of the page. (Indicated in picture.)
5. Google prompts you to agree with the EULA. Agree, or you won’t get the Google Drive App.
6.  Depending on how your browser is configured, you may be asked if you want to keep the file. Say yes, if you are not chicken.
7. Once the download is complete, click on the file in Chrome to mount the .dmg file. If you don’t see it, locate the file in the Finder in your Downloads folder.
8. Once the .dmg opens, you should find the image to contain only the Google Drive application and an alias to your Applications folder. Just drag the app into the Applications folder and launch it.
9. When you first launch the application, you should get the standard Google login dialog. Just sign in, again, with your Google credentials. Here I’m using my Google Apps credentials, but I could also use my gmail.com credentials. I don’t know why Google made the page so large either.
10. At this point, you will get a two dialogs in series. You may safely select “Next >” to continue. There are some settings in “Advanced setup” one enables you to sync Google Docs files. This is selected by default in the standart setup. When finished, you may click “Start sync”.
    

    First Dialog, just click on "Next >"

    

    Now you are ready to click "Start sync"

11. Here is the Advanced setup tab, I recommend selecting “Sync Google Docs files” and “Start Google Drive automatically”.
12. You will get a friendly banner that give another simplified instruction. Notice the Google Drive icon in the menubar. Yes I do use dropbox, but I’ll probably drop it for Google Drive soon.
13. Here is what the Google Drive folder looks like, notice the icon indicates if it is synced or actively uploading. Now you can repeat this on other Macs/PCs that you use, and your documents can be easily synchronized between computers. You can put any type of file in the folder, you are not limited to Google Docs.

For anybody at Google, I have found a bug already. I cannot get this to work on any of Macs that I manage at a local school, when they are running from a network account. If their files are all stored remotely on the server, the Google Drive application will refuse to run at all. No indication is given about why it crashes, I’ve just isolated it to the Network Accounts.

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