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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#471

Post by AlchemistCamp »

atonse wrote: post #209
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Is this really true? wow. I'm shocked that a company of Dropbox's size hasn't built native clients for each platform (or rearchitected the core to be based on something like Go or Rust that is fast and cross platform, and just building the UI parts in the native frameworks)

Google's much larger and they moved away from some excellent native clients like Google Talk, which IMO took the crown from MSN and other chat clients a decade ago. It's the same story for photos and other apps. They've consistently killed native apps and replaced them with poorer-UX pure web apps.

Meanwhile Slack is happily sticking with their Electron app and wasting the resources of hundreds of users machines and who knows how much electricity in total.

Re: The new Dropbox

#473

Post by xvector »

liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Just use iCloud instead of Dropbox.

Re: The new Dropbox

#474

Post by joshschreuder »

mattnewport wrote: post #448
kevinmgranger wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because email clients can only be as good as email itself, which isn't really good. ;)

I know you're being facetious but email clients fail to satisfy me primarily when it comes to search and organization, remaining performant when dealing with large archives of mail, good UI/UX and robustness / reliability. None of these are really problems inherent to email, though they are perhaps inherent to software.

I think the same problems appear in other domains with large libraries. Music players have also been historically terrible with bad UI, slow searching and many of the same issues you mentioned.

Re: The new Dropbox

#475

Post by cyberferret »

0x906 wrote: post #280
vvoyer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After receiving an email like: > This is all for just $20.88 more a year 1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise custome…

I self-hosted a Nextcloud installation and used 2x 4TB drives. The first is full dedicated to the Nextcloud use while the second is rsync-ed to the first every night. Then I deleted my 8 years old Dropbox account. Currently my only cloud provider is iCloud just for the photos, contacts, iwhatever backup.

This is a timely post. I just set up NextCloud myself, to sync my external HDD to my own managed cloud storage service. I've got NextCloud running on a VPS, and linked to a series of storage buckets on Wasabi.

Sometimes all I want is a quick and easy replication of local data to an off site storage facility, and also an easy way to share links with third parties who need access to certain stuff. I am getting tired of storage providers who started off by doing these two things really well, but then decided they wanted to add a ton of bells and whistles that are really of no value to me as a user.

(To be fair, I think Box.Net is the only cloud storage provider I've used over the past decade that still retains their original premise).

Re: The new Dropbox

#476

Post by Mikho »

Why would people still use Box, Dropbox, etc. when MS Office subscription provides so much more value, including huge storage, Office apps, and cross-platform integrations for less money. That's basically no brainer.

Re: The new Dropbox

#478

Post by Waterluvian »

Syzygies wrote: post #289
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong. A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cl…

So a file structure of a cyclic graph of symlinks is wrong and shall simply just break and blame the user?

Or one where you have one large file and symlinks of it all over the place? Should it just explode in size unexpectedly?

Re: The new Dropbox

#479

Post by TeMPOraL »

rodgerd wrote: post #370
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…

> This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy... I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run…

Well-integrated solutions were simple until SaaS companies purposefully broke it. There's nothing in software that would make it impossible to have an arbitrary calendar app work well with arbitrary file browser, file syncer, text editor, document editor, etc. A bit of system-level tools (that's kind of what the OS is for), a bit of common protocols. But when each of the above became redone as SaaS, interoperability became a matter of service providers signing agreements with each other, and not something end-users could set up.
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