A general trend being observed among Windows 8 apps is that, they tend to fare very poorly when compared to their Android or iOS counter parts. However every now and then few apps prove this notion wrong in its entirety. RainbowDrive definitely belongs to this league.
Another Cloud Management app?
You would ask why again. In what seems to be hands down the best integration of multiple cloud services I have ever seen in an app especially on Windows 8, RainbowDrive makes your life exponentially easier. The basic concept behind RainbowDrive is very simple : it lets you manage multiple cloud storage accounts easily within a single app. No doubt there are already many apps which claim to do this, but RainbowDrive actually wins real big over the implementation and ease of use.
RainbowDrive supports Google Drive, SkyDrive and Dropbox at the moment. Multiple accounts for each services are supported as well
The Interface
To begin with, the UI is very simple and clean. RainbowDrive clubs all your accounts neatly into separate grids, with manageable icon sizes representing the folders.
The highlight feature of the app is grouping of the content either based on individual cloud storage accounts or on the basis of the content. The latter view, labelled as simple “Type” view literally sorts all your content on the basis of the content type. And pleasantly, this mode actually is the core strength of the app.
The type mode groups files merely based on the types of the while, without bothering about which cloud service the file belongs too. This is actually very helpful, say when you just want to download all those images of yours which are spread over Drive and Dropbox.
Another nice add-on in RainbowDrive is the inclusion of inbuilt image and video viewer. This definitely comes handy in scenarios where you just want to preview the files without downloading them to your PC.
File Management
Coming to the file management aspect, basic operations expected to be included for a cloud client app i.e download and upload worked flawlessly during my usage. The app also supports creation of folders. However, I did feel that the inclusion of some extra functionalities like copying or moving files directly between cloud services would have been extremely useful.
One nifty feature I observed was the fact that RainbowDrive supports downloading folders without zipping them first. Also you can download or upload multiple files from different services simultaneously.
You can view your cumulative utilization of cloud storage by using the cloud management option under the settings Charm. You can also add more accounts from the same.
Verdict
Out of many similar apps present in the horde, RainbowDrive is easily one of the most useable and intuitive, hands down. Sure, there are a lot of areas where the app could use some more polish like the clumsy viewing mode switch or the extra delay in generating thumbnail of files, but they never disrupt your flow of work and are not even close to being show stopping. Combine this with the fact that the app performs very reliably and has a slew of cool features, and you have an actually productive and useful Windows 8 Modern UI application. A definite keep on your Windows 8 / Windows RT installation.
