Posts tagged with "dropbox"

The Dropbox Platform→

At its first developer conference that kicked off today, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the Dropbox Platform, a new initiative aimed at making Dropbox the “best foundation to connect the world’s apps, devices, and services”.

Part of the Platform is the new Datastore API, which will allow developers of Dropbox-enabled apps to sync more than just files:

Our Sync and Core APIs already take care of syncing files and folders, but as people use mobile apps more and more, a lot of their stuff doesn’t really look like a file at all. It could be anything — settings, contacts, to-do list items, or the latest doodle you drew.

With the Datastore API, we’re moving beyond files and providing a new model for effortlessly storing and syncing app data. When you use an app built with datastores your data will be up-to-date across all devices whether you’re online or offline. Imagine a task-tracking app that works on both your iPhone and the web. If it’s built with the Datastore API, you can check off items from your phone during a cross-country flight and add new tasks from your computer and Dropbox will make sure the changes don’t clobber each other.

It’s unsurprising to see various comments on how Dropbox Datastore looks like what Apple should have done with iCloud for third-party developers. Last month at WWDC, Apple acknowledged the issues that troubled iCloud’s Core Data sync and promised several fixes coming with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9.

It’ll be interesting to see if a new architecture based on drop-ins (components) that include (for now) a Saver and Chooser (for saving files to and picking them from Dropbox, respectively) will convince third-party developers of iOS apps to keep avoiding iCloud and embracing Dropbox. For as much as Dropbox improves upon its platform, key aspects of the iOS experience such as photos, videos, music, mail, contacts, and todos remain natively tied to Apple’s iCloud service. Can Dropbox apps, developers, and users grow faster than Apple can improve iCloud? Assuming that iCloud will work reliably in iOS 7 and Mavericks, will developers of groundbreaking and innovative apps support both iCloud and Dropbox? How many platforms is too many?

Dropbox says they now have 175 million users; the latest number from Apple is the 300 million iCloud accounts shared at WWDC ‘13. A first result of the new APIs will soon be shown in an update to Mailbox, which Dropbox owns.

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Dropbox for Mac Beta Brings Automatic Screenshot Sharing, iPhoto Import, New “Move” Menu

Dropbox public betas – known on the company’s forums as “experimental builds” – serve as a field test for new features that are being taken in consideration for the app’s desktop clients. And while they don’t always see the light of day in the public release channel, they do help Dropbox collect feedback for future updates and revisions.

Today, Dropbox has released a new public beta for Mac that contains some noteworthy new functionalities to speed up the process of adding files to your Dropbox account through the Finder, and particularly images.

The first one, an automatic screenshot sharing feature, is somewhat reminiscent of tools like Droplr and CloudApp: once enabled in the Preferences, it will allow Dropbox to redirect every screenshot taken on OS X to a /Screenshots folder in your Dropbox, sharing that file and putting a public link in your system clipboard. While not as full-featured as the aforementioned third-party tools, automatic screenshot sharing could indeed make for a nice solution to quickly share screenshots on Twitter and IM – retaining control over files that are simply located in the Finder.

In line with Dropbox’s renewed focus on photos, an iPhoto import feature should let the app turn iPhoto albums and events into Dropbox albums also viewable on the web. In practice, I haven’t been able to test the import feature in spite of my MacBook meeting the requirements mentioned on the forums (iPhoto 7.0 or higher). Based on the description, it does seem like Dropbox wants to replicate the Everpix experience with an automatic desktop importer taking care of fetching files from iPhoto and organizing them in Dropbox albums.

The last new feature of the beta is a “Move to Dropbox” contextual menu that will show up “for most files or folders outside of your Dropbox”. Essentially, this allows you to right-click on any file or folder and quickly send it to your main /Dropbox folder, but without automatic sharing. In my tests, the menu worked as advertised.

Dropbox experimental builds should be taken for what they are: public betas from a company seeking feedback from its users. Features introduced in these builds are sometimes kept, often tweaked, occasionally removed and re-engineered for a future implementation. You can download today’s new experimental build here.

A Month with Mailbox

Mailbox, Inbox Zero

Mailbox, Inbox Zero

Orchestra, the company originally behind Mailbox, set out to redesign the traditional mobile email app by transforming the inbox into a to-do list. Recently acquired by Dropbox to the tune of $100 million, Mailbox has been making waves in the media on the promise of helping people act-on their email more quickly and efficiently. Anticipation for the free email app began late 2012 and came to boil over as the app launched in February, thanks to an incredible amount of press attention and clever marketing through Twitter.

Questionably, Mailbox launched with a reservation system to cope with demand. Available on a first come, first served basis, Mailbox was initially only available to those who signed up for the service early-on. So far, over a million people have signed up to use the app, and the company has filled over 500,000 reservations according to a recent TechCrunch interview with Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood.

Mailbox has had its fair share of both praise and criticism. Understandably there’s a healthy amount of skepticism over whether Mailbox actually helps you deal with the bulk of email people receive in their inboxes.

I gave Mailbox my phone number before much of the recent press, leaving me with a reservation somewhere in the early 20,000s. My reservation was filled relatively quickly. As I downloaded the app, I decided I’d pass on early impressions to get a good feel for whether Mailbox could be my daily driver on the iPhone.

As Mailbox is structured around the principles of Inbox Zero, the actions that can be performed are built on top of making quick decisions about what’s necessary to keep. With mobile in mind, Mailbox is designed to help people quickly archive, delete, snooze, or put email in a “do someday” list. People are always checking their phones throughout the day, so why not give people an easier way to weed out the things that don’t matter?

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Dropbox 2.0 For Mac Now Available

Dropbox has today released an update to its desktop client for Mac. The new version of the app has been available as beta on the company’s forums for a few months, and the final build can be downloaded here.

The new Dropbox for Mac comes with a redesigned menubar tray with a timeline of the latest changes in your Dropbox account. Back in September, the company tried to introduce a new menubar design with another beta on the forums, but the concept was abandoned as it didn’t meet the expectations of several Dropbox users. Inspired by the minimal design of the new Dropbox for iOS, the Mac app now comes with an iOS-like popover that contains two large shortcuts for your Dropbox folder in the Finder and dropbox.com at the top, a timeline of changes, and sync information at the bottom.

The key to the new tray is that files can be clicked to be opened directly in the Finder and shared inline without leaving the app or bringing up a contextual menu. Upon hovering over a file, in fact, a “Share” button will appear: you can click it to instantly generate a Dropbox link that will open a new tab in your browser and that you can immediately send to someone else. Besides sharing, you can also accept a shared folder invitation directly from the app: in my tests, notifications of folders that had been shared with me arrived simultaneously on iOS and OS X, allowing me to accept them without having to use the Dropbox website.

Different filetypes come with different preview icons (image thumbnails will show an actual preview of the image), and the “Up to date” checkmark icon doubles as spinning refresh indicator when files are syncing to your Dropbox account (it also “pulses” when sync is complete – a nice touch). While network speed isn’t shown in the popover while syncing, you can view it by clicking the Preferences icon at the bottom of the window (which will open a contextual menu showing both time remaining and speed).

As a side note, you can still get the old Dropbox 1.0 menu by Control-clicking the Dropbox icon in the menubar.

After months of iOS and web updates, it’s nice to see Dropbox focusing on desktop clients again. I believe the new Mac app is a great improvement over the old version, especially in terms of how quickly you can share new files and open them in the OS X Finder.

Dropbox 2.0 is available here.

Dropbox 2.1 With New PDF Viewer→

Dropbox 2.1 With New PDF Viewer

Dropbox21

Dropbox21

Dropbox has released an update to its iOS app that brings three new features for iPhone and iPad users: a redesigned PDF viewer, notifications for folders shared with you, and a new “sort by modified date” option.

The new PDF viewer is based on PSPDFKit and it now allows you to access the table of contents and page thumbnails for every PDF document in your Dropbox. A button in the top right corner of the title bar lets you switch from single page view to thumbnails, while a search icon in the bottom bar allows you to search for any word inside a document (with match highlighting). On the iPad, these buttons are available as floating controls (pictured above). As with the previous versions of the app, you can open a PDF in other apps and copy its Dropbox link to the clipboard.

Dropbox is now capable of sending push notifications when someone shares a folder with you – a feature that the company has slowly been bringing to its desktop and mobile applications. In my tests, however, I haven’t been able to receive any notification yet. The new “Newest - Oldest” sorting option is available at the top of any folder next to the search. The design is in line with Dropbox 2.0, released in December.

Dropbox 2.1 is available on the App Store.

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Chaining Multiple Apps Together with Drafts

A few weeks ago, I took a look at the automation possibilities opened by Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s multi-purpose text app. In the article, I mentioned how a bug prevented Drafts from “linking to itself” more than once:

Therefore, my idea for cross-posting was: I can link to Drafts itself, and if the first action is successful, I can link to Drafts itself again. Essentially, I wanted to leverage the built-in App.net and Twitter actions to avoid the use of any third-party app. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in the current version of Drafts that doesn’t make that kind of action work.

With an update to Drafts released yesterday, Greg Pierce has brought various improvements to the app, including support for more customizable timestamps and dates using strftime, date and time tags for file names and URL actions, and a new way to encode strings with curly brackets.

Seemingly minor, the option to more easily URL encode strings is actually a very welcome addition: like in the latest Mr. Reader, instead of forcing the user to encode a URL into a longer string, you can simply put a URL inside {{ }} and let Drafts take care of encoding it. It means I can now experiment with building more complex workflows that contain actions for more external apps and, more importantly, for “sequential” tasks in Drafts itself. Easier encoding means we construct URLs that will tell Drafts “do this, and then do that” in a single workflow.

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been trying since yesterday to see how many apps I could chain together in a workflow, mainly out of curiosity and as a “proof” of concept. First, I tweeted about a Mr. Reader -> Drafts -> Poster workflow that would take selected text from an article, convert its Markdown to HTML, and then send it to Poster; the workflow consisted of three apps chained together, but I knew I could try to accomplish something a bit more ambitious. I kept on experimenting with Drafts URLs, and eventually I managed to build a single workflow with 3 apps and 4 different tasks involved. I’m posting it here for two reasons: a) I believe it’s a quite useful workflow; and b) it can serve as an example of what Drafts can do when you understand how to properly link multiple apps together. Read more

TaskAgent for Mac→

TaskAgent for Mac

I like Francisco Cantu’s TaskAgent. It’s a simple iOS app that lets you manage to-dos as text files in Dropbox. I previously covered the app when Francisco released version 2.0 last year, and I also described how I was integrating it with my Dropbox writing workflow.

Francisco has released a first Mac version of TaskAgent today. The Mac app comes with the same settings of the iOS clients: you can link it to Dropbox, create multiple lists (which are actually multiple text files), move done tasks to the bottom of a list and new ones to the top. On the Mac, there’s also an OmniFocus-like “quick entry” to bring up a panel with a keyboard shortcut; from the panel, you can quickly add a task to a specific list.

There are some improvements that I’d like to see in a future version of the app. The interface is a bit rough and the app could use more polished toolbar icons; the quick entry panel should be automatically dismissed after you hit Enter; I’d also like to be able to drag & drop tasks between lists and have hyperlinks recognized as clickable. I am confident Francisco is already considering these fixes.

For existing TaskAgent users, TaskAgent for Mac is a worthy companion. The app is available at $3.99 on the App Store.

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Dropbox Releases Completely Redesigned iOS App

Dropbox has today launched a major new version of its iOS app, featuring a new UI design, new upload features, and an updated photo experience.

As detailed in a blog post by the company, the new Dropbox aims at simplifying the user interface with “flattened out” colors, simpler lines, and less visual complexity. For instance, the new tab bar of the app doesn’t come with text labels, using only icons to indicate folders, Photos, Favorites, and Settings. In a way, the Dropbox redesign is somewhat reminiscent of the latest Rdio update for iOS, also focused on flat colors and an overall simplification of graphical elements.

The new Dropbox changes the upload system as well. In the previous version, there was an Uploads section to upload items from the iOS Camera Roll to a specific folder; users needed to specify the folder before starting the upload process. In Dropbox 2.0, every folder – including the main Dropbox one – has got a “+” button in the upper toolbar with two options: “Upload Here” and “Create New Folder”. I look forward to trying this feature in particular as I use the Dropbox app to upload photos on a daily basis to different folders; I don’t know whether an upload button dependent on the folder you’re currently viewing will eventually make me save taps, or require more navigation around folders.

Photos are also part of my Dropbox workflow, and the new app introduces a new browsing experience for them. According to Dropbox “all of your photos” including those you have “uploaded from other devices” will be available in the new Photos tab. This view comes with a grid interface to browse photos from newest to oldest. Interestingly, sharing options for photos now include separate entries for “Post on Facebook” and “Facebook Message”. The Photos view retains the Camera Uploads functionality of the previous version (though personally I use CameraSync for this, a third-party app that offers more settings for Dropbox photo uploads).

The new Dropbox app is available on the App Store.

Update: Based on my first tests, it appears only photos uploaded with the app’s Camera Uploads feature are recognized in the Photos tab; it doesn’t seem like the app is recognizing photos I uploaded with third-party apps like CameraSync. Too, like in the previous version of the app, you can’t star folders.

More screenshots below.