Book of Topaz /

Just Beam It

Feb 25 2017
Service
draganddrop

file transfer, snapchat style

No ads, no waiting; a quick and clean experience as a result

Parachutes away

Justbeamit is an alternative. Not a substitute or a replacement, but another option for transferring files. The main purpose of justbeamit is sending any file, any size when the common methods¹ don’t work. It’s short and sweet without any ads, registrations, pop ups, loading times; it just does the job and nothing more. So before you get too exicted let me give you other points to consider:

1. Justbeamit is a safe peer-to-peer connection: So it is basically a skinner box version of a torrenting program. And that means, as a seeder, it’s taking the internet you are using right then. If your upload speed is sufficient, then it will be faster than trying to upload a video on Youtube for a tenth of it’s size.

2. One person can download at a time: I think this is good as it acts much more like a sharing personal files than dumping it to a public location. I can see how it may be cumbersome to go through people one by one, but if there are more than three people ready to recieve a torrent would end up being more efficient and quick.

3. The connection must be persistent: Accidentally closing the browser tab will erase all good will in the world and the file will go up in smoke. This applies ditto for both parties so if they want it they must want it the same way. Then again there is an android app out there that keeps it going in the background but the point stands nonetheless.

Looks like they have jbi.link registered as a shortener. Image from google play

So you can see why I have labelled it as a sort of “snapchat”: You throw a file and send it of to someone, and they have 10 minutes to start the download process. You can see that they are downloading the file which is similar to a snap being “seen”. And once the download finishes, no records of the file are stored.

Stable and Trendy

From the first time I used the website back in 2013, until now, I don’t think a thing has changed about it. Although I haven’t used the android app or the python API script I threw all of this without one single interruption:

• ISOs up to 8GB
• Music and videos
• Stenography encrypted images
• Unsorted databases
• Archived websites
• Raw binary dumps
• Development crash reports

Because the website has no ads or registrations if your friend or co-worker needs something and is out of physical reach this is much faster than trying to upload the entire file to Dropbox or Google Drive. And as a frugal person like myself who does not have the cloud space available to upload giant files or the effort to remove the file afterwards this is a great service. But as it has not released any major features for the past few years, it’s presence is also slightly faded. It’s social media outlets like Google Plus and Facebook is has been abandoned oh but wait what’s this?

Please protect healthy Twitter accounts

Whoever is managing this twitter account is pretty cool. Maybe because the system works so well there isn’t much company news to provide, I like it when it is still showing it is keeping with the times. They know about new technologies arising not just secluded to computer science. But they’ve kept one of the strongest principles that will keep them running for a long time: don’t fix what ain’t broke.