Dropbox

Hardware and technical stuff
1

EDIT: Beta is over. Dropbox is released! So I’ll turn this into an “Impressions” thread instead…

I’ve got 10 dropbox beta invites if anybody wants to give it a try.


In a nutshell, Dropbox creates a folder on your system (Windows, Mac, Linux) and files you drop into the folder get “synced” with your Dropbox Online. You can keep multiple computers synced up atomatically if you install Dropbox on all of your machines or you can access your Dropbox via the web interface on machines that do not have Dropbox installed.

You can have shared folders with other Dropbox users and you can also send links to files to people that do not have Dropbox accounts. Shared folders allow multiple collaborators to make changes to files and every change is tracked.

Dropbox syncs up with your files online by sending delta data only so large files can be updated quickly. Dropbox also tracks all revisions and deletions so you can very easily go back and restore old versions or files or just extract data or whatever.

Dropbox has a Photos folder that lets you simply drop images into and they instantly go to an online album for sharing.

When it goes live you’ll get 2GB free but can buy more space if needed.

Anyway, it’s pretty slick. I’ve been testing a bunch of online syncing services and Dropbox is one of the better so far. I also like Syncplicity.com but they do not have Mac support yet.

2

They launched last week. No codes necessary.

3

Well shiiiit, look at that… OK, nevermind.

4

Thanks for the reminder. I finally got accepted to the beta on August 4th, but never got around to setting it up.

The biggest complaint so far is I see no way of making the ‘My Documents’ folder itself the dropbox. I can put ‘My Dropbox’ in the My Docs folder, but that means if I want to synch up anything in My Docs I’d have to add one additional folder tree step to get to it.

5

Right. I use Syncplicity for syncing up other folders (Docs, Work, Email, Quicken, Palm etc).

6

I’ve been using Live Mesh to do similar things and I love it. No Mac version (supposedly there will be one in the future, but uh yeah given Microsoft’s history of starting and stopping Mac projects I wouldn’t bet the farm on it), but that’s not much of a problem for me. Live Mesh gives you 5 gb free and it also has proxied remote desktop connections as an option to connect between different machines in your mesh. Like Dropbox, Live Mesh also allows shared folders but you can make any folder on your HDD part of the mesh.

I’m sure Dropbox is great, especially for Mac users, but I recommend anyone looking for something like this who is mostly Windows-based to check out Live Mesh too.

7

Live Mesh is not even at Beta. It usually works great, but sometimes comes up lame. I still use it quite often, but I wouldn’t count on it yet.

8

I’ve used Dropbox to good effect a few times. It’s good for not losing files (i.e. permanent backup)

I also used it as a code repo for two people working on an interpreted codebase simultaneously. It worked really well for that, but it wouldn’t scale to a big team, I think.

9

Dropbox is shutting down the Mailbox and Carousel.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-carousel-and-mailbox/

10

Never really used either of 'em, did you?

11

I didn’t even know they existed.

12

Hah, good going Dropbox.

13

Same boat here. “Well, I sure hope neither of those things is awesome, because now that I know they exist, they’re going away!”

14

Mailbox acted as a man-in-the-middle, holding copies of all your mail. No thanks. It was initially very popular but then dropped off.

Carousel was unable to compete with Instagram (for social media people) and Google Photos/Flickr (for everybody else). It was stillborn.

15

The only thing I liked about Carousel is that it was the easiest way I knew to email a picture from my phone. Google acts like email doesn’t exist and took way too many clicks to get photo’s.

Also it was nice to use Carousel to monitor which photo’s had been transferred to Dropbox.

But yeah, I didn’t use Carousel like they wanted me to.

16

The only thing I liked about Carousel is that it was the easiest way I knew to email a picture from my phone. Google acts like email doesn’t exist and took way too many clicks to get photo’s.

Also it was nice to use Carousel to monitor which photo’s had been transferred to Dropbox.

But yeah, I didn’t use Carousel like they wanted me to.

17

I don’t have an android device in front of me, but on iOS it’s as simple as bringing up a picture, going to the “actions” button on the bottom, and selecting email.

18

Yeah. . . on mine, it’d be (from Gallery) “Share Button” > “Gmail” > (If you have multiple accounts) “Select Account.” Not that bad really. Heck, I think the Gallery on my phone (may be Samsung-specific) even remembers the last app you did the Share action to and offers it as a dynamic button attached to the Share menu item.

19

Weird, on my Samsung S3, I bring up a picture in Gallery, click the share icon, then select email. This automatically attaches it to an email. I did it twice today instead of running through Airdroid.

[edit]I wonder how many seconds Armando beat me by. ;)

20

I believe Mailbox was the first app to try inbox management the way that Google’s own Inbox works. Though, I heard of Mailbox after already being on Inbox, but I’ve been told by others that Mailbox was there first.