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Dropbox Paper

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Re: Dropbox Paper

#31

Post by debt »

Huh? Hopefully they didn't waste a ton of resources on this. I doubt there even exists a market large enough to justify this.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#32

Post by joshbert »

OedipusRex wrote: post #25
ungzd wrote: post #21

After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.

I would describe it as a feature for a target audience. /s They took a ton of screen real estate just to show us pictures of people typing into non-descriptive text-editors and people use laptops.

My immediate thought was "another Dropbox project that'll be sunset in a year's time, huh?"

Re: Dropbox Paper

#33

Post by brianpgordon »

ungzd wrote: post #21

After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.

Google Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs.

s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010:

> Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-g...

Re: Dropbox Paper

#34

Post by raam86 »

ktta wrote: post #30

Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx. A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before) All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using…

are you talking about HTML? w3c got it figured out, or do you mean LaTeX?

Re: Dropbox Paper

#35

Post by rmkrmk »

ktta wrote: post #30

Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx. A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before) All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using…

AFAIK it's all markdown and you can export your files as markdown. There's also an API available to export your paper docs as markdown.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#36

Post by ssully »

dmd wrote: post #6

What about it? This was released in October 2015.

Possibly reposted in response to the recent release of Box Notes[1]?

My team uses Box, so all last week I saw multiple emails and posts about Box Notes, so I could be drawing a connection that isn't there. Either way neither Paper nor Notes seem useful to me.

[1]: https://www.box.com/notes

Re: Dropbox Paper

#37

Post by OedipusRex »

joshbert wrote: post #32
OedipusRex wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would describe it as a feature for a target audience. /s They took a ton of screen real estate just to show us pictures of people typing into non-descriptive text-editors and people use laptops.

My immediate thought was "another Dropbox project that'll be sunset in a year's time, huh?"

They Google'd it.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#39

Post by thepumpkin1979 »

I can't believe they spent 3 years on this, I can do all this and more with Quip as a super performant native Mobile and native Desktop. The killing feature of Quip is it's ability to Mix, in a single document, an spreadsheet(most of what you'd use in Excel), formatted source code, images, todo-list, mentions & collaboration, version control and rich formatting. The desktop app is a mix of web and native, but is not a memory hog like a CEF app, it's pretty slick.
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