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Dropbox Paper

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Re: Dropbox Paper

#91

Post by mikenew »

hackcrafter wrote: post #5
mikenew wrote: post #2

As a former user of both Mailbox and Carousel, I think I'll pass.

Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures? To be honest, I read through that whole page and I really am not sure I understand what "Paper" is. I'm guessing it's like slack + specialized components (lists/document snippets) and file sharing designed around collaborating on a product or more generally a project...

Mailbox was an acquisition. Carousel was launched by Dropbox, but it came out of their acquisition of Snapjoy.

The problem wasn't simply that they shuttered the services (particularly Mailbox), it was how they did it. Mailbox spent about a year with development completely stagnated. Essential features like searching were broken and Dropbox's response was "we're refactoring! Don't worry, big updates coming soon, please be patient!" And that went on right up until they said "Okay bye!"

Services get shut down. It sucks, but it happens. But stringing your customers along for a year knowing perfectly well that your product is not being worked on is pretty awful.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#92

Post by rrggrr »

Between Evernote, Office360 and Google Drive/Docs, etc. I'm of the opinion this was wasted time and money; and that it will not be a revenue or user growth driver for Dropbox. There are gaps in sharing and collaboration where paid demand exists. They include: end-to-end persistent encrypted sharing; File authentication; handwriting recognition/search; rule and ML based box culling; content-aware rules; mesh-network sharing; blockchain integration; content analysis for sourcing/data-viz; and so much more. I sense a lack of imagination at Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#93

Post by thepumpkin1979 »

petetnt wrote: post #49
thepumpkin1979 wrote: post #39

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…

Everything that you said in that post also applies to Dropbox Paper, sans the desktop app which Dropbox doesn't (AFAIK) offer.

Really? I couldn't find the spreadsheet, the table functionality is like Markdown-like tables to me

Re: Dropbox Paper

#94

Post by zo1 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #52
akeck wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing with passing markdown+css file+image tree to: pandoc {options} -H file.css --self-contained. It base64 encodes the images directly into the HTML5. The css in file.css is wrapped in and is inlined in the header. The result is a fat HTML file with all the basic bits to make an article included. Exact line: pandoc --standalone --toc -V "toctitle:'Title'" --self-contained --to html5 -H article.css -o fi…

For the longest time (5 or 6 years, way longer than Electron) I have been puzzled as to why there didn't exist a document format for offline websites/apps, that are basically a zip file of HTML+CSS+images+javascript. That way you could build simple, easily distributable multimedia documents and web apps.

I haven't used it in a while, but most browsers allow you to go File->Save, and it'll save everything in a contained folder structure that should be easily zippable. Including all linked images/CSS/JS, with their references fixed for local-consumption.

That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#95

Post by dumindunuwan »

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.

for me it looks like, Medium + Google Docs + Slack

Re: Dropbox Paper

#96

Post by dgfgfdagasdfgfa »

Scriptor wrote: post #55
brianpgordon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The functionality was polished and sexy. The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.

Heh, I had the reverse thought—if they let anyone who used the product near it they'd find SOMETHING that works!

Re: Dropbox Paper

#97

Post by joshpadnick »

Very thoughtfully designed. I liked it better than Quip. But all our docs are in Google Docs, which sometimes includes spreadsheets, which doesn't appear supported. The very nice UX around collaboration isn't enough to justify the migration pain of moving hundreds of Google Docs and losing some of our gdoc non-text docs.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#98

Post by tomkin »

hackcrafter wrote: post #5
mikenew wrote: post #2

As a former user of both Mailbox and Carousel, I think I'll pass.

Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures? To be honest, I read through that whole page and I really am not sure I understand what "Paper" is. I'm guessing it's like slack + specialized components (lists/document snippets) and file sharing designed around collaborating on a product or more generally a project...

>> Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures?

This is one of those distinctions without a difference.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#99

Post by desireco42 »

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.

Nice jab!

Re: Dropbox Paper

#100

Post by desireco42 »

joshpadnick wrote: post #97

Very thoughtfully designed. I liked it better than Quip. But all our docs are in Google Docs, which sometimes includes spreadsheets, which doesn't appear supported. The very nice UX around collaboration isn't enough to justify the migration pain of moving hundreds of Google Docs and losing some of our gdoc non-text docs.

Nothing is better then Quip! :)
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