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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#71

Post by turdnagel »

microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

I'm considering the same thing and switching to iCloud Drive as my family is heavily invested into the Apple ecosystem. The next versions of iOS and macOS will support shared folders, which was the one thing holding me back.

Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really have to want to use all their collaboration tools to make paying $12/mo worth it. Otherwise they're just sucking up more margin.

Re: The new Dropbox

#72

Post by diziet »

I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`.

Like:

  - Good product marketing messaging
  - Well done images and GIFs that get to the point
  - News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another article.
What?:

  - Huge spinning circular thing at the top
  - Content not taking the whole size of the page but strangely   taking the right 2/3rds~
  - Non-retina images
Would love to see metrics on:

  - Tweet highlight integration. Does it drive valuable KPIs?
  - Font: They are using https://sharptype.co/case-studies/dropbox/ . The case study from the foundry that made that font has a section with color `rgb(181, 208, 230);` font on a `linear-gradient( #d20b28 , #d20b28 );` background. That's light blue on somewhere between scarlet, crimson, vermillion or venetian red color space. My brain slightly breaks reading it. Does having your own font drive engagement? What do the KPIs on that look like?

Re: The new Dropbox

#73

Post by ubermonkey »

microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

>Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years.

Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.

Re: The new Dropbox

#74

Post by [deleted] »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #29

The blog has a loading icon? It took 10-15 seconds to render for me. Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?

[deleted]

Re: The new Dropbox

#75

Post by sithadmin »

mbreese wrote: post #50
Liquid_Fire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. Out of curiosity, why does Dropbox even need to care what the filesystem is?

It has to do with how they use xattrs to manage the syncing. They now only support a single FS on each OS. You could certainly argue that other filesystems have the necessary capabilities, but Dropbox decided to only support ext4. It’s probably the dominant filesystem for Linux, but in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers. https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-mes…

>in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers

After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.

Re: The new Dropbox

#76

Post by oauea »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #54
microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

I'm getting tired of their constantly dropping support for older versions of MacOS (I don't upgrade MacOS often because every new version is a net productivity hit for me), and their upgrader daemon that A. Cannot be shut off, and B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox. Here we go again. Every c…

If you refuse to update your software you deserve to have a hard time.

Re: The new Dropbox

#78

Post by SamuelAdams »

mbreese wrote: post #65

Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction. Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integ…

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”?

It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding.

In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.

Re: The new Dropbox

#79

Post by Cthulhu_ »

microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

Yeah I wouldn't mind paying less for less storage space, I'm only using it nowadays to keep a live backup of photos I take (also because pulling photos from the iphone onto a windows PC doesn't seem to work anymore?), using only 3.4% of the 2 TB of storage.
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