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Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

forbes.com

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Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#11

Post by dmix »

luigi wrote: post #9

Then come Chris, Jason and Joe (who has a Dropbox tattoo on his arm because he feels “Drew is changing the world”), more MIT brothers aiming to live a California dream they all imagined back in Cambridge as “billionaires, bottles and babes.” Eww, that's offputting.

> "billionaires, bottles and babes.”

When the reporter in the video interview brought that up he seemed pretty embarrassed.

Sounds like something university students might say.

If they made that statement as adults I think it would be more off-putting.

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#12

Post by VMG »

simplekoala wrote: post #8

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

I'd be interested to know the meaning of the sentence.

How do you hack a file system to display a logo?

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#13

Post by byrneseyeview »

luigi wrote: post #9

Then come Chris, Jason and Joe (who has a Dropbox tattoo on his arm because he feels “Drew is changing the world”), more MIT brothers aiming to live a California dream they all imagined back in Cambridge as “billionaires, bottles and babes.” Eww, that's offputting.

It was almost certainly a joke. Avoid sarcasm when talking to journalists; some quotes, out of context, are too good to pass up.

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#14

Post by kitsune_ »

simplekoala wrote: post #8

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498

"more pertinent is the fact that none of the integrations we do with the Finder are actually supported by Apple. this means that it takes significant reverse engineering of the Finder to make icon overlays/contextual menu items to work. Apple completely removed support for contextual menu items in SL (it's possible to have right click options, but it's not possible to have a submenu, or a submenu with options that change dynamically based on context).

in order to make these integrations work we have to inject code into the finder to make in memory replacements of finder code with our own (many complexities/details of hackery omitted). if it were easy, you'd see more products than just Dropbox able to do it ;-)"

also: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=938

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#15

Post by dr_ »

Jobs never changed his interpretation of things. He did in fact feel cloud storage was a feature and not a product, and that's exactly what iCloud is. For Apple it's a feature that will hopefully tie people in to their iOS devices. And with the likelihood that over time they will offer greater amounts of storage for free or a minimum payment, that's not good for Dropbox. I like Dropbox, I use it almost daily. But so far I've never actually paid for it. Same, so far, with iCloud. To Apple, this would be largely irrelevant, but for Dropbox, that's not so great.

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#16

Post by [deleted] »

VMG wrote: post #12
simplekoala wrote: post #8

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

I'd be interested to know the meaning of the sentence. How do you hack a file system to display a logo?

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#17

Post by taylorbuley »

gr366 wrote: post #3

Does Forbes.com have a print URL? I couldn't find one (did find a print.css which does almost nothing to optimize for printing), and I'd rather not encourage their splitting the article onto 4 separate pages by clicking through.

Unfortunately I don't think we do

In this case, however, it's a cover story -- the best print format we can offer

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#18

Post by wyclif »

luigi wrote: post #9

Then come Chris, Jason and Joe (who has a Dropbox tattoo on his arm because he feels “Drew is changing the world”), more MIT brothers aiming to live a California dream they all imagined back in Cambridge as “billionaires, bottles and babes.” Eww, that's offputting.

Sounds like a genuine sausagefest.

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#19

Post by Timothee »

VMG wrote: post #12
simplekoala wrote: post #8

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

I'd be interested to know the meaning of the sentence. How do you hack a file system to display a logo?

I'm assuming they're talking about the Dropbox logo that is displayed on the Dropbox folder and/or the sync icons displayed on the files and folders inside the Dropbox folder, functions which are likely reserved to the default System folders.

Re: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

#20

Post by rkudeshi »

kitsune_ wrote: post #14
simplekoala wrote: post #8

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498 "more pertinent is the fact that none of the integrations we do with the Finder are actually supported by Apple. this means that it takes significant reverse engineering of the Finder to make icon overlays/contextual menu items to work. Apple completely removed support for contextual menu items in SL (it's possible to have right click options, but it's not possible to have…

I had no idea installing Dropbox meant they were modifying the Finder. Why isn't there an option to disable this?
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