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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#91

Post by roter »

jrs235 wrote: post #56
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. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever. I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo…

I often find the "events" link to be helpful, finding files in order of upload date [0].

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/events

Re: The new Dropbox

#92

Post by codingdave »

Whenever I see moves like this, I think to myself how little of a real positive impact SharePoint had in the Enterprise world. And that was linking Office products, in large organizations that already used the products, and already collaborated for their jobs, while including the ability to write code against it all.

Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella, to link together products that are not coming from a single vendor, and not designed to work together... feels like a stretch.

Re: The new Dropbox

#94

Post by thinkharderdev »

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…

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

Re: The new Dropbox

#95

Post by mbreese »

sithadmin wrote: post #75
mbreese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

You’re right.

In this case, I should have just as easily said “paying customers” because there were a decent amount of people already using Dropbox (and paying for it) that had other than ext4 filesystems. I know many people that got bitten by this also had encrypted home directories (Ubuntu ecryptfs), which was also not supported and fairly common.

I personally use Dropbox heavily because it is an easy way to sync shared folders between all of the people I work with (mix of Mac and Windows). However, it’s really difficult to also use it with the Linux servers I also need to sync data to/from. In the end, I created a developer account and use a script that is linked to that account to copy data to/from Dropbox on demand.

Would it be nice to have a supported solution for this? Yes

Do I expect a supported solution from Dropbox? No. There are too many variables and I don’t expect Dropbox to be able to handle everything. I’m just happy that they make a solution possible for me to manually use.

Re: The new Dropbox

#96

Post by ihuman »

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)?

Ironically, their CMS is blocked by my office's firewall and the website isn't, so the website loaded instantly for me.

Re: The new Dropbox

#97

Post by jacobcohen11 »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #94
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…

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people

Re: The new Dropbox

#98

Post by _ah »

peternicky wrote: post #46
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…

Your feedback resonates with me when I think about my experience with nearly every new software I come across. If it isn’t a monthly subscription (or the yearly option where I am ‘saving’ money) being shoved down my throat, more than likely I am being propositioned to pay for features that I simply don’t care about. One example, Airtable, has paid plans. In order to get the feature I want, I need to upgrade to the se…

Unfortunately this is basic business economics. When you want to drive overall revenue, it's often cheaper to boost an existing customer and sell them more stuff rather than go try to find an additional new customer.

Re: The new Dropbox

#99

Post by onion2k »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #63
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)?

99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. CSR is merely fashionable, not better.

99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render.

If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often a lot faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that aren't cached, parsing the new page, and repainting everything.

SSR is what the web was designed for after all.

That's plain wrong. Using a browser to launch an application was one the use cases in Tim Berners-Lee's original memo about the web in 1989 - "If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide." (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html). There's no suggestion that the user would have to leave their browser when they clicked such a link.

Fast forward 10 years from Tim's proposal and Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest (via ActiveX) for fetching fragments of data to IE5 in 1999. We've had 20 years, which is 2/3 of the time the web has existed, of client-side applications. You may well have a preference for server-side rendering but you don't get to claim the web was designed for server-side as a fact. It's not true.

Re: The new Dropbox

#100

Post by mmargerum »

SisRob wrote: post #80
mmargerum wrote: post #59

Is there some open source version of something like rsync that is available to just sync between machines on a LAN? No cloud involved.

Just use rsync + ssh.

i forgot to mention one of the machines is windows and I didn't want to go down the cygwin rabbit hole. It is windows 10 though so perhaps I could use WSL.
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