On the functionality end of things I think dropbox should be stop new feature development until heavy UX is done with large unbiased test groups. The application is simple and it works pretty well but recently I've noticed different barriers to use, notifications that I'd prefer not to see just getting in the way. It's a result of Zawinski's law, it's happening to gmail where they think adding more bells and whistles is needed but it's not, in many case user experience declines, for example playing a youtube clip now blacks out the rest of your gmail page while you watch it. Application developers need to learn that less is more.
Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#12I just see one problem with this solution. You can't create Retina images out of base64 strings on any web browsers today.
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#13What about a sprites-like system? Since you pretty much know which pictures the user will request, just glue the next 100 thumbnails together into one big picture and then take it apart again on the device.
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#14I don't really use Dropbox, but I was randomly browsing through mine looking for a photo the other day and it was a "holy shit" moment. It's really fast to scroll through a huge number of photos. I had been scrolling through Flickr a few minutes before and it was a massive difference. Flickr was very much a scroll-and-wait experience.
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#15I just see one problem with this solution. You can't create Retina images out of base64 strings on any web browsers today.
> You can't create Retina images out of base64 strings
Why not? There's no such thing as a 'retina image', they're just a larger resolution. There's nothing stopping you from requesting a @2x set of thumbnails
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#16I just see one problem with this solution. You can't create Retina images out of base64 strings on any web browsers today.
Are you sure you can't just serve up a 400x400px base64 image and put it in an image element with a height and width of 200?
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#17I don't really use Dropbox, but I was randomly browsing through mine looking for a photo the other day and it was a "holy shit" moment. It's really fast to scroll through a huge number of photos. I had been scrolling through Flickr a few minutes before and it was a massive difference. Flickr was very much a scroll-and-wait experience.
For me, Flickr is basically unusable. Slideshows are impossibly slow, information is positioned outside the browser viewport, and simply bringing up an image-page is reminder of dialup. I can only blame inertial lockin for their usage numbers.
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#18On the functionality end of things I think dropbox should be stop new feature development until heavy UX is done with large unbiased test groups. The application is simple and it works pretty well but recently I've noticed different barriers to use, notifications that I'd prefer not to see just getting in the way. It's a result of Zawinski's law, it's happening to gmail where they think adding more bells and whistles…
hi there, I work at dropbox and am curious to learn more. what things did you run into that were unexpected and retracted from the UX? hopefully we can make it better!
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#19Were you already serving thumbnails over https? Or were they served over http?
edit: I was also wondering whether you can skip downloading some thumbnails based on the velocity of the scroll.
Re: Improving Dropbox Performance: Retrieving Thumbnails
#20Were you already serving thumbnails over https? Or were they served over http? edit: I was also wondering whether you can skip downloading some thumbnails based on the velocity of the scroll.
We were already serving over https (we've implemented HSTS some time ago).
And good observation about scrolling -- we do in fact queue, prioritize, and skip thumbnails based on scrolling.