14 ms·

Paper is Dropbox's new vision for how teams can work together

179 points by slackpad 11y ago

state 11y ago
Somehow simple note taking is something that really hasn't been done right by anyone. This seems like it could be nice, but I'd like it a lot more if I could host it myself.
- marcstreeter 11y ago
  this ^^^^ especially with regard to companies. At least in the company where I work, the inability to self host is a deal breaker. Is this different for many/any?
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    Working on a solution for this. ;)
    - state 11y ago
      Looking forward to it!
    - luchadorvader 11y ago
      Really? If so I'm interested. I would love to help with a project like this, I'm tired of passing word docs, excel sheets around to customers with the chance that I might have something out of date.
  - benjarrell 11y ago
    Same most places I've been, makes it a total nonstarter.
chishaku 11y ago
Is Paper significantly different to Hackpad or simply a rebranding?
- lhl 11y ago
  I was a relatively heavy Hackpad user (still using it, actually) and have been beta testing Notes/Paper for a while - it started off very Hackpadish, but has evolved a bit, enough that it may actually be suitable for my small company to finally migrate off of Google Sites. For me, the biggest missing piece for Hackpad, and why it was always a non-starter for any serious knowledge collection purposes was its lack of hierarchical structure. A few weeks ago, Paper finally added support for folders, which while still a bit clunky/not-ideal (the sidebar doesn't give you a tree nav, there's no way to see the whole structure), it at least meets that minimum bar for organizing say, more than 20 notes. I haven't done much group collaboration work (the teams/org stuff was just introduced, and honestly, the thought of Dropbox completely messing up my/my coworkers personal Dropbox accounts terrifies me - the horror stories posted in the thread don't help assuage my fears, and I am not sure I have a conceptual understanding/trust of how Dropbox models accounts/teams), and while Folders have permissions, I can't figure out how to assign/inherit permissions (crucial for working with clients, contractors), but on the bright side, it's not literally insane like Google Sites' permission system (it involves modifying global inheritances to give access to specific sub-trees). In most other ways, it is like Hackpad++ - mostly like you would have expected it to evolve: great feeling typeahead search, instant editing, OT-based multi-user editing, and improved/extended embeds, and adds annotations, which I can see being conceptually pretty useful. The biggest thing missing for me now is offline editing - it's not strictly a requirement for our office use, since that's online-only as well, but there are so many times traveling/offsite where it's a huge pain. The other things are mostly niggles - ways to actually see the site/document structure, the option to attach files (especially images) w/o them being directly embedded, a way to view/track embeds/media/files only, but overall it may be the best wiki-like app out there for small groups now, especially those that hate traditional (modal editing) wikis.
  - jamwt 11y ago
    Hi! Dropbox two account works great. It's specifically designed to keep your personal Dropbox completely separate (and unscrewup-able) from your company assets. We built it because people had been intermingling personal Dropboxes with company assets and it created messes for them when they left the company, etc. Anecdotally, I've had my personal Dropbox account since 2007 (was one of the first 1000 beta users), and my family manages tons of stuff in it. I started using two account in 2013 when joined Dropbox (the company), before we released it publicly. Your existing Dropbox gets moved to "Dropbox (Personal)" and a second folder gets created called "Dropbox (Your Company)". Nothing changes about the behavior of "Dropbox (Personal)". No problems whatsoever with the separation of personal and company--and that reflects the vast majority of our users' experiences as well onboarding a team. As another user in this thread mentioned, Dropbox doesn't support 3+ accounts, so if you work for multiple companies (who all use Dropbox), that might be a problem. Just a guess, I think the other problem report in this thread was someone who wasn't expecting Dropbox "for teams" to create a completely new type of account for everyone at his/her company. They probably use basic or pro accounts in an ad-hoc way at their company and were unfamiliar with the teams product and the fact it is distinct.
dijit 11y ago
Not to be confused with facebooks paper. https://itunes.apple.com/app/id794163692 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id794163692
- xemoka 11y ago
  And Paper by 53 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-notes-photo-annotation/id506003812?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-notes-photo-annotation...
  - brorfred 11y ago
    And the Papers app http://papersapp.com http://papersapp.com
    - harlanlewis 11y ago
      And Papers, Please https://appsto.re/us/8CKV3.i https://appsto.re/us/8CKV3.i
      - ucaetano 11y ago
        And paper, you know, that wood pulp material we use to wipe our asses, amongst other less important things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper
        pen2l 11y ago
        I like to make pretend-airplanes with paper. But I also write on it too. And, while I only make simple things with paper, some other people are able to make fantastically complicated strcutures with it.
  - thirdsun 11y ago
    My first thought - don't know if it's an issue for them, but with all the "Papers" and recently Pencil by Apple their product names are becoming less unique by the day.
new299 11y ago
My apologies for bring this up again, as I'm sure the developers worked hard on this feature, but since Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ http://www.drop-dropbox.com/) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. With a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service. I think all users should carefully consider if they are happy with using Dropbox in light of the views of their board members.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Upvoted. I personally don't care enough and I really, really find Dropbox useful, but I also support holding companies accountable for whatever decisions society deems controversial. Thanks for reminder!
- vxxzy 11y ago
  Wow. This is news to me. I have been a long time paying customer of Dropbox. This makes me uneasy. Time to start migrating away from it. Does anyone have recommendations on Dropbox Alternatives?
  - phireal 11y ago
    I use ownCloud [1] on a pretty low end VPS and the recent released are greatly improved over the earlier versions. The clients (mobile, desktop) are also much better now. [1] http://www.owncloud.org http://www.owncloud.org
  - reefab 11y ago
    I've migrated to Bittorent Sync: http://getsync.com http://getsync.com it's a "no cloud" solution. They don't see your data. I'm happy with it but I do have a NAS at home that serves as a "always on" sync point for my other devices.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      Check your connections. I moved away from Bittorrent Sync because I couldn't easily stop it hitting external trackers, or if I did, sync stopped working completely (especially on the Android client).
mathgeek 11y ago
Wood tabletop? check Moleskine notebook? check iPhone? check This passes the generic tech news site photograph test.
- Spiritus 11y ago
  So?
- odiroot 11y ago
  Well Moleskine are pretty good notebooks. Although I get your point.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    They are but I prefer the Silvine A6 twinwire pads, quality isn't as good but they work out about a pound each in bulk, paper quality is excellent and pages are easy to tear out.
  - ansgri 11y ago
    I thought it too, until started (resumed) writing with fountain pens. The ink leaks through the page awfully.
    - fernandotakai 11y ago
      it's so hard writing on my moleskine with anything other than ballpoint pens -- the smudges are just insane.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        I absolutely love the feel of a gel pen, and tried out the Pentel Energel Liquid Gel Pen (picked it up at Walmart on a lark). Its phenomenal. I still get the gel feel while writing in my Moleskin, but the ink dries in under a second (I've tested this!). Very satisfied (its the only pen I purchase now). I'm using the 0.7mm point, but intend to try the 0.5mm point in short order, as most of my writing is diagramming infrastructure/code/etc. http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-EnerGel-Deluxe-Retractable-Ink-Value/dp/B00FGQ0RKQ/ http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-EnerGel-Deluxe-Retractable-Ink-...
Grue3 11y ago
I think Dropbox would really benefit from integrating something like Pushbullet. Both apps are concerned with syncing. If I need to send a file to one of my devices, I use Dropbox. If I need to send a link, I use Pushbullet. There's no reason why it couldn't be a single app.
teaneedz 11y ago
Does it support Markdown?
- jnpatel 11y ago
  The current beta supports a Markdown pseudo-syntax (# for headings, and * for bullet lists) but not an entire Markdown standard as far as I can tell.
  - i386 11y ago
    Thats very much like what Atlassian did with Confluence's wiki markup when they decided to go rich text only
- z1mm32m4n 11y ago
  It doesn't support Markdown in the sense that your document isn't saved as plain text, but just about every feature of markdown is available: headings, lists, code blocks, inline code, and horizontal rules are all supported. The only ones that aren't are the inline formatting options (bold, italic, underline, links), but these all have the standard Cmd/Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, so it's basically just as good.
jamwt 11y ago
I'm pretty excited about this one. We've been using Paper internally at Dropbox (under a few different codenames) for more than a year, and we now run almost all our collaboration through it--design docs, specs, etc. I'm on the infrastructure (storage) team, so I haven't really had anything to do with its development. My team's use started out as "dog fooding", like most internal adoption, but now we'd all be pretty pissed if it disappeared because it's simply way better than the array of tools we were using before. Great usability, speed, etc. Feels lightweight but powerful at the same time. Anyway, hopefully you all like it too.
- smt88 11y ago
  Awesome, a Dropbox employee commenting on this thread. Let me ask you some questions that I hope you might answer, but also understand if you aren't willing/able: 1. Will there ever be a zero-knowledge option at Dropbox? I just stopped using Dropbox in favor of SpiderOak because I wanted to start storing medical records in the cloud, and there's no way I'd do that where you (or your coworkers or hackers) could read them. 2. How do Dropbox employees feel about the Drop Dropbox campaign? Is Condoleezza Rice's involvement part of an overall culture or just a small anomaly (or somewhere in between)?
  - jamwt 11y ago
    Usual disclaimer, I am not an official Dropbox spokesperson, and these are not necessarily company stances. 1. The best answer I can give you is here: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/28 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/28 The background behind it is we evaluate this option (and debate it internally) all the time, and it's neither in line with the type of services we are expected offer (collab, etc), and there is insufficient customer demand for it. It is also dangerous, since nontechnical users lose their private keys with startling frequency, and it's difficult to explain to them that we're completely unable to help them when this happens. We do, however, totally know there is a small slice of technical users that want to treat Dropbox as an opaque "backup service", and they're willing to take on the risk of key management. So we refer them to one of our partners that specializes in providing this layer on top of Dropbox. Never say never, so we may decide to offer this type of account in the future--possibly to businesses. We would have to alter or disable large swaths of collaboration features that require server-side representations/alterations of data. But, as I said, it's a product feature under constant consideration. 2. Once again, I have to emphasize, this is a personal take, not Dropbox's take. I sympathize with the tinfoil hat crowd, but I think most Dropbox employees find it a disappointing take on the company that has always strived to make the very best cloud storage product possible, on all platforms. We are in a segment (cloud sync/collab, not backup) with some very, very large players. Storage is not a loss leader to us. It is not subsidized by a massive advertising network capitalizing on customer behavioral data. Our customers are not what's for sale--our storage services are. If you or your business does not like our services--does not consider them fast, secure, etc--enough to pay for them--we don't get revenue. I very much doubt any of our competitors cares as much about your data staying private, available, usable, etc, as we do. There is no other way for us to capture value from the market then make you all ridiculously pleased with Dropbox and Dropbox's treatment of your data. So I would ask you to imagine what the culture of a company looks like that is incentivized thusly. We obsess over doing the right thing with your data. So threads like this are hard to read, to be honest. And that's all I'll say about this issue.
huac 11y ago
Looks exactly like Quip.com
- pinaceae 11y ago
  yes, exactly. right as Quip just closed a new round of funding.
octref 11y ago
This is something I'd personally use. A lot of alternatives exist on the market but none of them look as refined as Paper. Paper looks really similar to http://onword.co http://onword.co (by Daniel Eden at Dropbox) regarding the minimalism and limitation on formatting. I guess Hackpad team is working on the backend. I just hope this project will not end up like Mailbox. I've been using Mailbox on OS X for half a year. Although once in a while I encounter some bugs, it's still very usable. A few months ago, they released an upgrade from 0.4 to 0.7. The UI became uglier in orders of magnitude and many basic functionalities just broke. After experiencing it for 3 days I switched back to Mail.app. I have sent quite a few bug reports and suggestions, but got no response. I wonder if they still care about Mailbox at all.
- huac 11y ago
  Not Dropbox employee, but I think they don't care about Mailbox. Especially since Gmail Inbox now has support for Google Apps hosted mailboxes (my primary Mailbox use case, though the org hasn't activated Inbox), and that app is probably superior to Mailbox in every way.
abtinf 11y ago
After the disaster that is Carousel (particularly on iOS), I am extremely reluctant to use any other dropbox apps. Carousel has had major bugs in their iOS client that have not been fixed in nearly a year. I'm talking core features, like background upload of photos not working, which could have led to the loss of priceless photos of my kids, had I not been more vigilant before taking my phone in for service. Its a fair bet that a goodly number of dropbox customers have lost photos due to this bug. No fix in sight.
- binhex 11y ago
  As a counterpoint, I quite like Carousel, and I haven't noticed any problems. Background uploads work for me, although it seems to wait until I am on wifi to upload.
  - Tehnix 11y ago
    I too quite like Carousel. Regarding the background upload, I think you can enable cellular in the settings for the app?
smt88 11y ago
Wow, thanks so much for the reply! Your answer to my second question is interesting because I kind of understand the tin-foil-hat argument, but I don't totally see how Rice would create additional pressure to violate privacy. She's a civilian now and, presumably, completely locked out of the current administration. To me (someone without a tin-foil hat), I think the issue is more symbolic. Rice is a terrible human being and a seasoned deceiver of the public. It's almost like we're asking ourselves, "If you'd allow her to be part of your leadership, what else would you do?" When I've thought about it, that wasn't enough to counterbalance exactly what you mentioned -- the idea that a single privacy breach at Dropbox could mean the end of the company. She's barely a part of the leadership and may have almost no say in what the company does. The ultimate decisions are probably still in the hands of the executive team. That's why I was a customer until very recently. All that said, I don't understand how Rice is valuable enough to counterbalance the bad PR from the tech community. Tech-y people get small companies to adopt certain brands over others, and then those small companies grow into large companies. Maybe I'm naive, and Rice offers some amazing connections or something? Either way, if much of the Dropbox team has your attitude and values, I can honestly say I hope the company has a prosperous, breach-free future ahead of it.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  These attempts to blackball people in their professional lives for their political opinions (see Brendan Eich at Mozilla) and political decisions (this DropDropBox stuff) are really no better than the Hollywood Blacklisting during the McCarthy witch-hunts that we all look back on as a dark chapter of American history. It really goes against the spirit of tolerance and plurality that America has embodied at its best. I can only hope that just like for McCarthyism, we will all wake up from this binge in a few years and realize just how far we've strayed from our best ideals.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    I too believe that all people should be free of any consequences of their actions.
    - 11y ago
CephalopodMD 11y ago
Can you do collaborative code on this? That's a game changer.
- antonl 11y ago
  yes
krmmalik 11y ago
I'm really surprised that only one person has mentioned Quip this whole time. Quip is already solving this problem and -- i have to say -- is doing a stellar job at it. Simple and minimalist approach to collaborative content/document writing. Ive been using Quip for over a year now across multiple organisations. Its probably the most important tool for my company in terms of knowledge sharing.
6stringmerc 11y ago
A neat development, and I am consistently intrigued and impressed by collaboration tools for teams. As an internal tool, I could see it being constructive in some limited scenarios. If anybody can mention instances where using something like this or Google Docs with multiple people at the same time, I'd love to hear your stories to level-up my understanding of use-case scenarios. But...in my business experience with teams across a few different industries, however, I'd say "No" so fast you'd think I had some kind of inherent bias. Well, I think I do. The modern conference call, speed of data transfer, and online presentation tools that exist should - and do - work just fine when there is one expert at the controls. Usually that expert was me. Taking disparate pieces from different people and getting them in right, often in real-time, was part of my job. Another part of my job was helping people "talk through" what they intended to communicate, and help phrasing and spelling along the way. Examples include responses to RFPs in a Word template, or any one of the development phases in a PowerPoint 11x17 or slide deck. These would eventually be client-facing, and could be done on the fly if so desired (rather than input/output versioning, often hosted on SharePoint). Then, when finished, it was suitable for production. I don't see how Paper is an improvement on this process, but rather, a situation of allowing too many cooks in the kitchen. Again, I'm only speaking from my realm, and take pride in learning about new things (like JamKazam) that are still developing or even ahead of their time. YMMV.
mtgx 11y ago
Why can't Dropbox build something like this in their app? https://cryptomator.org/ https://cryptomator.org/
- i386 11y ago
  There is likely limited customer desire - try selling "client side encryption" in a consumer product.
edanm 11y ago
Here's a thought: Dropbox should buy Evernote, especially since they're in trouble, and fix one of the biggest problems with that service by making it sync using Dropbox (and making its data easily accessible).
- bad_user 11y ago
  Culturally speaking, Dropbox and Evernote do not fit. I've been a long time Dropbox user and in the process I've also used Google Drive and played with OneDrive. If there's something that sets apart Dropbox from its competition is that (1) Dropbox is simpler (2) without compromising on the really important parts, like having a history or Linux support and (3) the set of available features work really well. Not sure what the right word for it is. Minimalism? At times it's annoying of course. For example Dropbox's native client is the best, but their web interface sucks. Like for example if a folder is too big, the web interface will refuse to move it. Comparing that web interface with Google Drive is not even funny, though the native client and the cross-platform support more than makes up for the shortcomings of the web interface. But going back to Evernote - seriously, it's a piece of shit and I always wondered why people use it. I would rather have Dropbox build something minimalist by themselves than to acquire Evernote. Or let others build things that integrate with Dropbox. I just bought licenses for 4 different operating systems for 1Password precisely because it integrates with Dropbox.
- brown9-2 11y ago
  A merger of two "in trouble" companies isn't an idea with a great track record.
snorrah 11y ago
Good to see the legacy of Google Wave lives on
the_watcher 11y ago
If they've simply made a better collaborative word processor than a Google Doc, that alone would be a pretty huge upgrade. Nice job
daniel_iversen 11y ago
Another Dropbox employee here (but not part of the Paper product team or engineering). We're all super excited about this beta launch because it totally has changed how we work internally and liberates you to be creative I feel (and we've had and still do have access to a lot of different tools). Happy to answer any questions around the productivity aspect of questions curious people may have about the product who don't have access to the beta yet!

179 points by slackpad 11y ago

state 11y ago

Somehow simple note taking is something that really hasn't been done right by anyone. This seems like it could be nice, but I'd like it a lot more if I could host it myself.

marcstreeter 11y ago
this ^^^^ especially with regard to companies. At least in the company where I work, the inability to self host is a deal breaker. Is this different for many/any?
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Working on a solution for this. ;)
  - state 11y ago
    Looking forward to it!
  - luchadorvader 11y ago
    Really? If so I'm interested. I would love to help with a project like this, I'm tired of passing word docs, excel sheets around to customers with the chance that I might have something out of date.
- benjarrell 11y ago
  Same most places I've been, makes it a total nonstarter.

chishaku 11y ago

Is Paper significantly different to Hackpad or simply a rebranding?

lhl 11y ago
I was a relatively heavy Hackpad user (still using it, actually) and have been beta testing Notes/Paper for a while - it started off very Hackpadish, but has evolved a bit, enough that it may actually be suitable for my small company to finally migrate off of Google Sites. For me, the biggest missing piece for Hackpad, and why it was always a non-starter for any serious knowledge collection purposes was its lack of hierarchical structure. A few weeks ago, Paper finally added support for folders, which while still a bit clunky/not-ideal (the sidebar doesn't give you a tree nav, there's no way to see the whole structure), it at least meets that minimum bar for organizing say, more than 20 notes. I haven't done much group collaboration work (the teams/org stuff was just introduced, and honestly, the thought of Dropbox completely messing up my/my coworkers personal Dropbox accounts terrifies me - the horror stories posted in the thread don't help assuage my fears, and I am not sure I have a conceptual understanding/trust of how Dropbox models accounts/teams), and while Folders have permissions, I can't figure out how to assign/inherit permissions (crucial for working with clients, contractors), but on the bright side, it's not literally insane like Google Sites' permission system (it involves modifying global inheritances to give access to specific sub-trees). In most other ways, it is like Hackpad++ - mostly like you would have expected it to evolve: great feeling typeahead search, instant editing, OT-based multi-user editing, and improved/extended embeds, and adds annotations, which I can see being conceptually pretty useful. The biggest thing missing for me now is offline editing - it's not strictly a requirement for our office use, since that's online-only as well, but there are so many times traveling/offsite where it's a huge pain. The other things are mostly niggles - ways to actually see the site/document structure, the option to attach files (especially images) w/o them being directly embedded, a way to view/track embeds/media/files only, but overall it may be the best wiki-like app out there for small groups now, especially those that hate traditional (modal editing) wikis.
- jamwt 11y ago
  Hi! Dropbox two account works great. It's specifically designed to keep your personal Dropbox completely separate (and unscrewup-able) from your company assets. We built it because people had been intermingling personal Dropboxes with company assets and it created messes for them when they left the company, etc. Anecdotally, I've had my personal Dropbox account since 2007 (was one of the first 1000 beta users), and my family manages tons of stuff in it. I started using two account in 2013 when joined Dropbox (the company), before we released it publicly. Your existing Dropbox gets moved to "Dropbox (Personal)" and a second folder gets created called "Dropbox (Your Company)". Nothing changes about the behavior of "Dropbox (Personal)". No problems whatsoever with the separation of personal and company--and that reflects the vast majority of our users' experiences as well onboarding a team. As another user in this thread mentioned, Dropbox doesn't support 3+ accounts, so if you work for multiple companies (who all use Dropbox), that might be a problem. Just a guess, I think the other problem report in this thread was someone who wasn't expecting Dropbox "for teams" to create a completely new type of account for everyone at his/her company. They probably use basic or pro accounts in an ad-hoc way at their company and were unfamiliar with the teams product and the fact it is distinct.

dijit 11y ago

Not to be confused with facebooks paper. https://itunes.apple.com/app/id794163692 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id794163692

xemoka 11y ago
And Paper by 53 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-notes-photo-annotation/id506003812?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-notes-photo-annotation...
- brorfred 11y ago
  And the Papers app http://papersapp.com http://papersapp.com
  - harlanlewis 11y ago
    And Papers, Please https://appsto.re/us/8CKV3.i https://appsto.re/us/8CKV3.i
    - ucaetano 11y ago
      And paper, you know, that wood pulp material we use to wipe our asses, amongst other less important things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper
      - pen2l 11y ago
        I like to make pretend-airplanes with paper. But I also write on it too. And, while I only make simple things with paper, some other people are able to make fantastically complicated strcutures with it.
- thirdsun 11y ago
  My first thought - don't know if it's an issue for them, but with all the "Papers" and recently Pencil by Apple their product names are becoming less unique by the day.

new299 11y ago

My apologies for bring this up again, as I'm sure the developers worked hard on this feature, but since Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ http://www.drop-dropbox.com/) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. With a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service. I think all users should carefully consider if they are happy with using Dropbox in light of the views of their board members.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Upvoted. I personally don't care enough and I really, really find Dropbox useful, but I also support holding companies accountable for whatever decisions society deems controversial. Thanks for reminder!
vxxzy 11y ago
Wow. This is news to me. I have been a long time paying customer of Dropbox. This makes me uneasy. Time to start migrating away from it. Does anyone have recommendations on Dropbox Alternatives?
- phireal 11y ago
  I use ownCloud [1] on a pretty low end VPS and the recent released are greatly improved over the earlier versions. The clients (mobile, desktop) are also much better now. [1] http://www.owncloud.org http://www.owncloud.org
- reefab 11y ago
  I've migrated to Bittorent Sync: http://getsync.com http://getsync.com it's a "no cloud" solution. They don't see your data. I'm happy with it but I do have a NAS at home that serves as a "always on" sync point for my other devices.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    Check your connections. I moved away from Bittorrent Sync because I couldn't easily stop it hitting external trackers, or if I did, sync stopped working completely (especially on the Android client).

mathgeek 11y ago

Wood tabletop? check Moleskine notebook? check iPhone? check This passes the generic tech news site photograph test.

Spiritus 11y ago
So?
odiroot 11y ago
Well Moleskine are pretty good notebooks. Although I get your point.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  They are but I prefer the Silvine A6 twinwire pads, quality isn't as good but they work out about a pound each in bulk, paper quality is excellent and pages are easy to tear out.
- ansgri 11y ago
  I thought it too, until started (resumed) writing with fountain pens. The ink leaks through the page awfully.
  - fernandotakai 11y ago
    it's so hard writing on my moleskine with anything other than ballpoint pens -- the smudges are just insane.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      I absolutely love the feel of a gel pen, and tried out the Pentel Energel Liquid Gel Pen (picked it up at Walmart on a lark). Its phenomenal. I still get the gel feel while writing in my Moleskin, but the ink dries in under a second (I've tested this!). Very satisfied (its the only pen I purchase now). I'm using the 0.7mm point, but intend to try the 0.5mm point in short order, as most of my writing is diagramming infrastructure/code/etc. http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-EnerGel-Deluxe-Retractable-Ink-Value/dp/B00FGQ0RKQ/ http://www.amazon.com/Pentel-EnerGel-Deluxe-Retractable-Ink-...

Grue3 11y ago

I think Dropbox would really benefit from integrating something like Pushbullet. Both apps are concerned with syncing. If I need to send a file to one of my devices, I use Dropbox. If I need to send a link, I use Pushbullet. There's no reason why it couldn't be a single app.

teaneedz 11y ago

Does it support Markdown?

jnpatel 11y ago
The current beta supports a Markdown pseudo-syntax (# for headings, and * for bullet lists) but not an entire Markdown standard as far as I can tell.
- i386 11y ago
  Thats very much like what Atlassian did with Confluence's wiki markup when they decided to go rich text only
z1mm32m4n 11y ago
It doesn't support Markdown in the sense that your document isn't saved as plain text, but just about every feature of markdown is available: headings, lists, code blocks, inline code, and horizontal rules are all supported. The only ones that aren't are the inline formatting options (bold, italic, underline, links), but these all have the standard Cmd/Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, so it's basically just as good.

jamwt 11y ago

I'm pretty excited about this one. We've been using Paper internally at Dropbox (under a few different codenames) for more than a year, and we now run almost all our collaboration through it--design docs, specs, etc. I'm on the infrastructure (storage) team, so I haven't really had anything to do with its development. My team's use started out as "dog fooding", like most internal adoption, but now we'd all be pretty pissed if it disappeared because it's simply way better than the array of tools we were using before. Great usability, speed, etc. Feels lightweight but powerful at the same time. Anyway, hopefully you all like it too.

smt88 11y ago
Awesome, a Dropbox employee commenting on this thread. Let me ask you some questions that I hope you might answer, but also understand if you aren't willing/able: 1. Will there ever be a zero-knowledge option at Dropbox? I just stopped using Dropbox in favor of SpiderOak because I wanted to start storing medical records in the cloud, and there's no way I'd do that where you (or your coworkers or hackers) could read them. 2. How do Dropbox employees feel about the Drop Dropbox campaign? Is Condoleezza Rice's involvement part of an overall culture or just a small anomaly (or somewhere in between)?
- jamwt 11y ago
  Usual disclaimer, I am not an official Dropbox spokesperson, and these are not necessarily company stances. 1. The best answer I can give you is here: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/28 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/28 The background behind it is we evaluate this option (and debate it internally) all the time, and it's neither in line with the type of services we are expected offer (collab, etc), and there is insufficient customer demand for it. It is also dangerous, since nontechnical users lose their private keys with startling frequency, and it's difficult to explain to them that we're completely unable to help them when this happens. We do, however, totally know there is a small slice of technical users that want to treat Dropbox as an opaque "backup service", and they're willing to take on the risk of key management. So we refer them to one of our partners that specializes in providing this layer on top of Dropbox. Never say never, so we may decide to offer this type of account in the future--possibly to businesses. We would have to alter or disable large swaths of collaboration features that require server-side representations/alterations of data. But, as I said, it's a product feature under constant consideration. 2. Once again, I have to emphasize, this is a personal take, not Dropbox's take. I sympathize with the tinfoil hat crowd, but I think most Dropbox employees find it a disappointing take on the company that has always strived to make the very best cloud storage product possible, on all platforms. We are in a segment (cloud sync/collab, not backup) with some very, very large players. Storage is not a loss leader to us. It is not subsidized by a massive advertising network capitalizing on customer behavioral data. Our customers are not what's for sale--our storage services are. If you or your business does not like our services--does not consider them fast, secure, etc--enough to pay for them--we don't get revenue. I very much doubt any of our competitors cares as much about your data staying private, available, usable, etc, as we do. There is no other way for us to capture value from the market then make you all ridiculously pleased with Dropbox and Dropbox's treatment of your data. So I would ask you to imagine what the culture of a company looks like that is incentivized thusly. We obsess over doing the right thing with your data. So threads like this are hard to read, to be honest. And that's all I'll say about this issue.

huac 11y ago

Looks exactly like Quip.com

pinaceae 11y ago
yes, exactly. right as Quip just closed a new round of funding.

octref 11y ago

This is something I'd personally use. A lot of alternatives exist on the market but none of them look as refined as Paper. Paper looks really similar to http://onword.co http://onword.co (by Daniel Eden at Dropbox) regarding the minimalism and limitation on formatting. I guess Hackpad team is working on the backend. I just hope this project will not end up like Mailbox. I've been using Mailbox on OS X for half a year. Although once in a while I encounter some bugs, it's still very usable. A few months ago, they released an upgrade from 0.4 to 0.7. The UI became uglier in orders of magnitude and many basic functionalities just broke. After experiencing it for 3 days I switched back to Mail.app. I have sent quite a few bug reports and suggestions, but got no response. I wonder if they still care about Mailbox at all.

huac 11y ago
Not Dropbox employee, but I think they don't care about Mailbox. Especially since Gmail Inbox now has support for Google Apps hosted mailboxes (my primary Mailbox use case, though the org hasn't activated Inbox), and that app is probably superior to Mailbox in every way.

abtinf 11y ago

After the disaster that is Carousel (particularly on iOS), I am extremely reluctant to use any other dropbox apps. Carousel has had major bugs in their iOS client that have not been fixed in nearly a year. I'm talking core features, like background upload of photos not working, which could have led to the loss of priceless photos of my kids, had I not been more vigilant before taking my phone in for service. Its a fair bet that a goodly number of dropbox customers have lost photos due to this bug. No fix in sight.

binhex 11y ago
As a counterpoint, I quite like Carousel, and I haven't noticed any problems. Background uploads work for me, although it seems to wait until I am on wifi to upload.
- Tehnix 11y ago
  I too quite like Carousel. Regarding the background upload, I think you can enable cellular in the settings for the app?

smt88 11y ago

Wow, thanks so much for the reply! Your answer to my second question is interesting because I kind of understand the tin-foil-hat argument, but I don't totally see how Rice would create additional pressure to violate privacy. She's a civilian now and, presumably, completely locked out of the current administration. To me (someone without a tin-foil hat), I think the issue is more symbolic. Rice is a terrible human being and a seasoned deceiver of the public. It's almost like we're asking ourselves, "If you'd allow her to be part of your leadership, what else would you do?" When I've thought about it, that wasn't enough to counterbalance exactly what you mentioned -- the idea that a single privacy breach at Dropbox could mean the end of the company. She's barely a part of the leadership and may have almost no say in what the company does. The ultimate decisions are probably still in the hands of the executive team. That's why I was a customer until very recently. All that said, I don't understand how Rice is valuable enough to counterbalance the bad PR from the tech community. Tech-y people get small companies to adopt certain brands over others, and then those small companies grow into large companies. Maybe I'm naive, and Rice offers some amazing connections or something? Either way, if much of the Dropbox team has your attitude and values, I can honestly say I hope the company has a prosperous, breach-free future ahead of it.

marcoperaza 11y ago
These attempts to blackball people in their professional lives for their political opinions (see Brendan Eich at Mozilla) and political decisions (this DropDropBox stuff) are really no better than the Hollywood Blacklisting during the McCarthy witch-hunts that we all look back on as a dark chapter of American history. It really goes against the spirit of tolerance and plurality that America has embodied at its best. I can only hope that just like for McCarthyism, we will all wake up from this binge in a few years and realize just how far we've strayed from our best ideals.
- mhurron 11y ago
  I too believe that all people should be free of any consequences of their actions.
  - 11y ago

CephalopodMD 11y ago

Can you do collaborative code on this? That's a game changer.

antonl 11y ago
yes

krmmalik 11y ago

I'm really surprised that only one person has mentioned Quip this whole time. Quip is already solving this problem and -- i have to say -- is doing a stellar job at it. Simple and minimalist approach to collaborative content/document writing. Ive been using Quip for over a year now across multiple organisations. Its probably the most important tool for my company in terms of knowledge sharing.

6stringmerc 11y ago

A neat development, and I am consistently intrigued and impressed by collaboration tools for teams. As an internal tool, I could see it being constructive in some limited scenarios. If anybody can mention instances where using something like this or Google Docs with multiple people at the same time, I'd love to hear your stories to level-up my understanding of use-case scenarios. But...in my business experience with teams across a few different industries, however, I'd say "No" so fast you'd think I had some kind of inherent bias. Well, I think I do. The modern conference call, speed of data transfer, and online presentation tools that exist should - and do - work just fine when there is one expert at the controls. Usually that expert was me. Taking disparate pieces from different people and getting them in right, often in real-time, was part of my job. Another part of my job was helping people "talk through" what they intended to communicate, and help phrasing and spelling along the way. Examples include responses to RFPs in a Word template, or any one of the development phases in a PowerPoint 11x17 or slide deck. These would eventually be client-facing, and could be done on the fly if so desired (rather than input/output versioning, often hosted on SharePoint). Then, when finished, it was suitable for production. I don't see how Paper is an improvement on this process, but rather, a situation of allowing too many cooks in the kitchen. Again, I'm only speaking from my realm, and take pride in learning about new things (like JamKazam) that are still developing or even ahead of their time. YMMV.

mtgx 11y ago

Why can't Dropbox build something like this in their app? https://cryptomator.org/ https://cryptomator.org/

i386 11y ago
There is likely limited customer desire - try selling "client side encryption" in a consumer product.

edanm 11y ago

Here's a thought: Dropbox should buy Evernote, especially since they're in trouble, and fix one of the biggest problems with that service by making it sync using Dropbox (and making its data easily accessible).

bad_user 11y ago
Culturally speaking, Dropbox and Evernote do not fit. I've been a long time Dropbox user and in the process I've also used Google Drive and played with OneDrive. If there's something that sets apart Dropbox from its competition is that (1) Dropbox is simpler (2) without compromising on the really important parts, like having a history or Linux support and (3) the set of available features work really well. Not sure what the right word for it is. Minimalism? At times it's annoying of course. For example Dropbox's native client is the best, but their web interface sucks. Like for example if a folder is too big, the web interface will refuse to move it. Comparing that web interface with Google Drive is not even funny, though the native client and the cross-platform support more than makes up for the shortcomings of the web interface. But going back to Evernote - seriously, it's a piece of shit and I always wondered why people use it. I would rather have Dropbox build something minimalist by themselves than to acquire Evernote. Or let others build things that integrate with Dropbox. I just bought licenses for 4 different operating systems for 1Password precisely because it integrates with Dropbox.
brown9-2 11y ago
A merger of two "in trouble" companies isn't an idea with a great track record.

snorrah 11y ago

Good to see the legacy of Google Wave lives on

the_watcher 11y ago

If they've simply made a better collaborative word processor than a Google Doc, that alone would be a pretty huge upgrade. Nice job

daniel_iversen 11y ago

Another Dropbox employee here (but not part of the Paper product team or engineering). We're all super excited about this beta launch because it totally has changed how we work internally and liberates you to be creative I feel (and we've had and still do have access to a lot of different tools). Happy to answer any questions around the productivity aspect of questions curious people may have about the product who don't have access to the beta yet!