A little over a year ago, Google officially changed the name of its Docs app to Drive and gave users cloud storage to compete with Dropbox. While so far the search giant has yet to dethrone the incumbent, the service does have one distinct advantage over the competition: a wide array of extensions and apps that integrate directly into the service. Many of the apps listed here are actually standalone web apps. If you see something you like but aren't particularly keen on using Google Drive for your cloud storage, you can still use many of these services on their own. You'll just need to handle file management separately. Web Apps for Drive We recently covered some of the best apps for Chrome that you're probably not using, but Google Drive integration affords quite a few more options for dealing with your documents in a way that other cloud storage solutions do not. The following apps integrate with Google Drive, which means you can access them via Drive's web interface on any browser or operating system. Drive Notepad Gives You Plaintext Editing 8 Extensions That Make Google Drive More Powerful Than Dropbox Drive Notepad gives you the ability to both read and create basic Notepad files, the format-less text documents Windows users are so familiar with. You can open these files in Notepad itself if you're on a Windows machine where you have Google Drive installed, but if not there's the default web app that you can open in Chrome. As we mentioned previously, WeVideo is great for performing simple video edits on the web. If you want your compilation to be a bit more portable, you can use Drive to store all your project files and assets in a single folder that you can access from anywhere. Keep in mind, of course, that video files can fill up space really fast, so if you plan to use this app regularly, you may want to spring for some extra storage space. Professional architects and interior designers may find this app a bit underpowered, but for the average person looking to map out their next home design project (or just experiment with new ideas), FloorPlanner is a powerful tool for designing and furnishing a virtual home. As with the other apps, files are saved directly in Drive and accessible on any browser with just a right-click. As long as your coworkers are still using Dropbox (and they do still have quite a few reasons to do so), you'll probably still need to interact with it at some point. With CloudHQ, you can sync your entire collection of files or just specific folders. You can choose either one- or two-way sync, and there's even the option for a one-time sync if you just want to move some files over. It also allows you to access your files from directly within Drive via the sidebar. Google Drive still has a way to go before it can take Dropbox's place as king of the cloud mountain (for example, copying the public link for a shared file in Windows Explorer is a needlessly complicated affair), but the web interface in particular has a lot going for it that Dropbox just doesn't (or can't) offer yet. One final note on cleanup: if you try out any of the apps mentioned above and later decide you don't want them around (your Create dialog can get pretty cluttered if you install all of these), you can remove them under Settings in Drive's web interface. Just click Manage Apps to remove any applications you've linked with Drive, or to set defaults for which app should automatically open which type of file.
