Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox Paper

dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 214 posts

Re: Dropbox Paper

#111

Post by eslaught »

tekacs wrote: post #51

I'll throw Notion ( https://notion.so/ ) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this. I've used Paper a number of times, starting from long before Notion was a thing, having been a happy Etherpad and Hackpad user in the past. Somehow Paper managed to inspire less in my collaborators than either the latter services (where perhaps plain text was the factor) or than Notion…

I just tried this in the browser and I can't get autofocus to work (Firefox 51 on Linux). Every time I hit enter for a new paragraph I need to click on it to be able to type again. Needless to say, a very dissatisfying experience. Though I can imagine it being nice if the auto-focus actually worked.

I sent them a bug report, we'll see if they fix it.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#112

Post by rrdharan »

rrggrr wrote: post #92

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 s…

Dropbox's enterprise offering includes OCR with handwriting recognition:

https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/22/dropbox-ios-app-scanning...

I believe it was previously discussed on HN but I can't find the link anymore, anyway they go into detail on the implementation here:

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/08/fast-and-accurate-doc...

Re: Dropbox Paper

#114

Post by Grue3 »

I'm impressed how the landing page is completely localized in Russian. Even the screenshots. You can switch the language in the selector at the bottom with like 20 different languages. Pretty cool for a small(?) company like Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#115

Post by HarveyKandola »

nicolas314 wrote: post #105
Angostura wrote: post #58

All these lovely services in the comments that I would love to use at work, but I can't because, I'm in the UK, working with somewhat sensitive personal data and there is no way we can commit that stuff to a data centre in the U.S somewhere these days. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than letting people self-host.

Second this. All these fancy services are neat but hosting private data in the US is seen in Europe as a major security risk, when it's not a complete no-no. Would be cool to know about self-hosted options.

At the risk of getting down-voted for self-promotion...

For self-hosting try https://github.com/documize/community -- WYSIWYG or Markdown, integrate data from Trello, GitHub, or roll your own integration.

Still early days yet, but you should get a feel for docs/wiki/SaaS data embedding.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#117

Post by sagivo »

dropbox evolution:

sync files - Google Drive

sync photos - Google Photos

sync docs that are like websites and also track progress and chat and tons of other features you don't really need but will be shut down in a year!

Re: Dropbox Paper

#118

Post by eitland »

synchronise wrote: post #108
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…

There was a project that forked Wave when it was handed to Apache, can't remember the name but it seemed nice to use

For those who wants to try, a demo is available on oasis.sandstorm.io

Re: Dropbox Paper

#119

Post by ktta »

akeck wrote: post #68
ktta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I could really see making great looking documents with this. Although the problem is we're using all these cli tools (I love them too) to edit them. So the problem is when I try to edit them on a new computer or even online, there's no way for me to do it in most cases, and in when I actually can install packages for all that, there's some dependency management I have to do. One more thing, sinc…

I hear you on needing piles of CLI packages. Regarding the web browser, the pandoc HTML seems pretty basic, so even the lightweight GUI browsers will probably handle it correctly. Also, if you include the correct bits in each image link in the markdown, I believe the resulting HTML5 will render with your included image descriptions in a text-only browser.

Here[1] is the HTML 5 standard. It includes a lot of things that a word file would never need. You're correct about not needing a lot of the things that say a browser like chrome has. Can we still not achieve the same thing with something simpler?

[1]:https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

Re: Dropbox Paper

#120

Post by nine_k »

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…

One of the problems is that people want different things from a "simple document format".

Some want rendering-agnostic structure, like Wiki / Markdown / Org mode, that emphasizes structure and text, with things like links, tags, etc.

Other want to print centered headers on level 1, and left-aligned for level 2, and body text with a particular font, with fragments in a different color, and pictures with text flowing around them, etc.

These two camps command different design goals. A format that makes one of these easy adds complications and edge cases to the other.

The funny thing is, the same people periodically need one tool and the other, and even want to mix them. Many of them would consider having two tools for these jobs superfluous, especially if paid. They'd rather bend an existing tool, because how hard it is to add spans of colored text? or collapsed sections? It's, like, a hundred lines of code!

Hence the modern office formats, tolerably doing a huge spectrum of things, none of them brilliantly, and hopelessly complicated.

Post reply on HN