Previous versions of CloudMounter cost $30. The update now makes the app and most popular cloud storage services FREE! If you need more cloud storage services, a full license is now $44.99

What’s new in CloudMounter for Mac v3.0:
– From now on you can mount Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive services for free;
– Encryption for aforementioned cloud accounts is also without charge;
– Box cloud storage is now supported;
– Backblaze cloud storage is now supported;
– Amazon S3-compatible storage solutions are also supported;
– “Shared with me” Google docs can be managed in Finder.

CloudMounter 3.0 runs on macOS 10.10 and later, and a 15-day demo is available for download.

The bad news is that EpicPxls chose the most convoluted and sloppy way to provide the icons to you. The file you will download is a single tiny PSD file. Each icon is saved in a Layer Group in the layers panel that contains various Shape layers for each color in the icon. So technically they are vector art. They’re just not the easiest to work with.

If you choose to select the appropriate shapes and paste them into Adobe Illustrator to save them as individual proper logo files (as I have), you’ll also notice that you may need to do some cleanup work on the paths.

Still, this is much easier than trying to find the official vector files on Google’s own Developer site.

I’m not sure what people’s fascination with making the email process into anything but email, but apparently Google is on board. Gmail wasn’t bad enough, now there’s Google Inbox. I wonder how long it’ll be before they kill this, too.

If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, it’s a bit more difficult. That’s because Google includes Flash as part of the browser itself. Thankfully, they’ve included it as a plug-in which can be turned off.

Type about:plugins in the URL bar and hit Return/Enter. A list of the plug-ins you have installed is displayed. Note that these are plug-ins, not extensions you install from the Chrome Store. Find the Adobe Flash Player plugin in the list and tick the Disable checkbox. After restarting Chrome, Flash will be off.

The downside is that Flash will be re-enabled the next time Google updates Chrome, which is quite often. You can download Flash blocker extensions, but I prefer to completely remove it and save myself the overhead of having yet another extension installed.

With Instagram, Facebook chose to allow it to live-on for now – but I suspect it will eventually get fully integrated into Facebook’s brand apps. Unfortunately, Google has not been as kind. They’ve made it clear that they have no intention on adding features to it in the future. It’s dead. And while Facebook only hired the developers and not purchased the apps themselves, they’re essentially dead as well.

I’m not suggesting that you should not buy apps from independent developers. They’re what makes the Apple community great. And I absolutely do not blame any developer for selling their company for large sums of money. They worked hard to create a great app or service and they deserve the rewards.

But you should take these recent acquisitions into consideration when you purchase your next app that may be a mission-critical one. Let me give you an example.

I love Default Folder X. I consider it to be my most important utility, and the first thing I install on a new Mac. I have no problem shelling out any upgrade fee the developer chooses to charge, because I know it isn’t going anywhere. Default Folder has been around since the pre-Mac OS X days. To my knowledge, they’ve never had to resort to drastic price drops or bundle promotions to sell the app, and the developer already has it ready for OS X Mountain Lion. And I can’t see any company outside of Apple wanting to buy the app because it’s such a niche app – for power-users only.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have an app like Toast Titanium that is on its third owner (currently, Corel owns it). While Toast has been around a long time, I wouldn’t recommend buying it anymore because there are plenty of other apps to burn optical media discs, including Apple’s built-in burner, and it appears that nobody has found it to be profitable or it wouldn’t have been sold yet again.

The cost of applications available on the Mac App Store are very affordable. It’s hard not to take a chance on a $3.00 application. But if you’re going to rely heavily on an application, you should probably think hard about the longevity of the app and the developer. Is the developer charging enough to make a living off the sale of the app? Is the app a “trendy” one that you think may go away or change dramatically in a short amount of time? Are there larger, more established companies selling an app that does the same thing? In the case of Sparrow – I almost saw this coming, which is why I never purchased the app.

One last thing to consider. Is the app based almost entirely on another service? I love Tweetbot – and can’t wait for the Mac version to ship. But something tells me it won’t be long before it dies, because it’s entire existence is based on Twitter allowing it exist in the first place. If Twitter decides they no longer want to allow 3rd party apps to use their APIs, Tweetbot and all the other 3rd party Twitter apps are dead.

Simple is always better. Simple-to-use always beats feature-rich-but-complicated. If you believe that, then you know why Facebook is beating the digital pants off Google+ in the social media arena.

Facebook is a fairly simple service:

1. You sign up
2. You search for friends or companies you want to follow
3. You click a “Like” button on their page
4. You get a feed of everything they post (text and photos)

There’s very little thinking or learning-curve involved with using Facebook. Finding new friends is dead simple using Facebook, as is finding brands you wish to follow, and sharing photos and video. There is very little in the way of techy lingo used on the site, and outside of the privacy controls, the entire site is easy for even the most non-geek user to navigate and use. Now let’s look at Google+.

This past week, I had cause to re-visit my account on Google+, as well as help someone else set-up an account. Now I don’t consider myself a tech/social media genius, but I think I’m a fairly smart guy in tech matters. It’s rare that I feel completely stumped by a service or piece of software, but Google+ has me (and virtually everyone I talk to about it) completely confused and left wondering why and how anyone would use it.

After setting up your Google+ account, you’re immediately met with the first problem: trying to find friends or companies to follow. There simply aren’t a lot of “normal people” using it. This is a speed-bump on the Google+ highway that isn’t really Google’s fault. But the brick wall you run into as soon as you get on the road is. As soon as you find enough people and brands to follow on Google+, you have to place them in Circles.

Google+ makes you think, really hard, before you can use it. Even if you can figure out what a Circle is, how to use them, or even why you would want them, you’re then presented with the problem of deciding what Circles can see the posts you create. If you’re like many average consumers, you’re probably creating one Circle with everyone in it, then sharing everything publicly – because it’s easier.

Once you get past Circles – which I suspect many people never do – you’ll have a lot of lingo to learn. Hangouts and Ripples will be the first things you see that you have no clue about. What the hell is a “Ripple?” I still have no idea, nor do I wish to expend the energy to find out. How does one send a message to someone?

And if you can get past all the complexities presented with the use of Google+, you run into yet another brick wall. If you want to use Google+ on your smartphone, you’re stuck with Google’s official G+ app. There are no third-party apps like TweetBot, Twitterrific, or the dozens of popular Twitter clients available for Twitter, which helped popularize the Twitter service itself. And unlike Facebook, every app and service on the planet doesn’t integrate with Google+.

Google+ looks beautiful, and the layout of the site is actually simple. But using the service for the average person is anything but. And that’s why even with massive amounts of publicity from Google, and them pushing it on every Google product user, it will most likely remain a distant second to Facebook for average consumers considering the use of social media.