Castle.so Upload and share your files, beautifully. | Hacker News Reader

Castle.so Upload and share your files, beautifully.

castle.so

86 pointschrisledet62 comments

Looks pretty straightforward. But why use this over, for example, crate? Also, how are you going to make revenue out of it? S3 does cost money.

#edit: Almost forgot. Well done on the UI front. Minor gripe: an actual button to select the file to upload would be nice. Having to launch Finder and browsing to the file I'm looking for, then dragging it back to the browser, can take much longer than just clicking a button, browsing and clicking "open".

Agree on the select button. Drag and drop is neat, but is usually annoying when my browser is full screen.

Drag & drop doesn't seem to work for me (Debian GNU/Linux, dragging from Thunar file manager to firefox). So I second the request for a file select button.

I second the seconding. I couldn't try the service because I don't even have a graphical file manager installed so I couldn't even try to drag'n'drop from anywhere. Then again, I'm not likely to really use this kind of services either since I have my own server which I can scp files to.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll certainly add a classic upload page. Also, we plan to have freemium model soon. We also have a Mac & Linux client in the works - just need to find the time!

Alright but what if I'm on BSD and I have a keyboard driven window manager without a mouse?

What I mean to say is, the class upload page is probably more important early on than individual OS clients.

I really do like the design and concept, though.

A Somalian domain means that I will never use this service: the country is not politically stable enough. Sorry.

How does a country's political stability affect what domain names you will use?

The nameservers for the .so domain are not physically located in Somalia: http://www.zonecut.net/dnsgeo/SO..html

Because the trustee of the domain (which one would assume would be an organization within the country) has administrative rights for the domain. And that trustee can decide to require local presence to use that TLD, which might leave this particular service offline, at least for a time.

You missed the shenanigans around Libya and the .LY domain, I guess?

http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3503/bitly-builds-busine...

It does however tend to color your judgement about how professional and reliable this service is. If they risked their future on the stability of the Somalia domain registry - just so they could have a quirky domain name.

Calling yourself slashdot is funny if you are a geek site - worrying if you are my pension fund.

It's so beautiful I can't figure our how to use it. I read the about section, which seems to suggest that you should drag a file onto the browser, and then something will happen. I dragged a text file onto the red circle, and it just opened the file in the browser. No upload happened as far as I could tell. I'm using Opera 11.52 and Win XP. Am I just missing the point?

You need to drag the file onto the Castle which is the large gray area on the bottom half of the screen.

I get the same result. It just opens the text file on my local machine for me to read.

I'll look into this.

Same, text file on Windows/Firefox. Other formats (PNG, SVG) were displayed in the browser without difficulty.

You mean you didn't test it for compatibility with major browsers.

The site was tested on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE9.

I think he means he'll look into.

Same problem, windows XP/firefox 3.6. (dropping a .png file)

Incidentally, I found some text that says "Drag & drop your file onto the Castle below.", but it's white on white, so I was only able to notice it by selecting the text. If I had seen that text originally, it would have made the page slightly less mysterious.

The color is coming from line 1244 of https://castle.so/assets/application-85b2387ecd44d11edb66f04...

The text is supposed to be white; it's on a blue sky background.

Any way to upload a file if your browser or OS doesn't support drag-n-drop?

Would've been nice if they told me that before I signed up. Well, you got my email now, let me know when it becomes usable.

Definitely easy to use, but once I was on the preview page for my image, I didn't see an easy link to share right now. Is the link I'm on shareable? I think there should be a few default sharing options (other than Twitter/Facebook) right on the page: link, e-mail, maybe SMS?

Edit: I see the Sociable buttons that include e-mail, this should be much more obvious. Still don't see an obvious "Copy this link".

Yeah the idea is that the link is sharable. We'll find a way to articulate this better. Sorry.

Nice. Seems similar in functionality to http://ge.tt/ and others.

Does anyone know of a service that allows for easy upload and management (search, tags etc) of files stored in different cloud providers (S3, dropbox, Google etc, not stored in the service)?

I tried to drop an image file. While it correctly fired the dragover event(changed the text to "Drop it like it's hot"), it didn't prevent the default drop event correctly - instead firefox 3.6 just showed me the image.

same happens to me in Chrome 15.0.874.106 on OSX 10.6.8.

Instant short-links is a nice idea, especially if you're aiming for the Twitter market.

Progressive enhancement would be good: the background doesn't render correctly in IE9 making the main text impossible to read. That applies to the homepage and the sign-up page. You'll lose potential users who will simply move on.

http://www.webpagetest.org/results/11/11/03/JS/22M02/1_scree...

> he background doesn't render correctly in IE9 making the main text impossible to read.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll love into it and fix this asap.

"Castle is our little baby who we work on whenever we have some free time."

Perhaps true, but not inspiring for confident usage.

This doesn't seem to work in Opera

Please elaborate. Do you mean the drag uploading?

Since that's your only feature, I would assume that's what he's talking about. Opera does not support html5 drag & drop.

Atlassian uses Google Gears as an alternative for browsers that don't support it, and I think there are other tricks to support it, but I'm not sure.

Perhaps browser feature detection would be in order, if you're not already doing this?

We're going to add a classic file upload page for those who do not have a HTML5 supported browser. Thanks for the feedback.

I've never heard of modern Opera as being considered not to support HTML5. The concept is pretty nebulous though.

I see a castle and what looks like a sunset behind it. I'm not sure what I should see, but I don't think that's it.

You should look into putting up a DMCA link sooner, rather than later. New file-sharing sites are often used by pirates.

EDIT: Now found such a link, under 'uploads'. It could be easier to find, under support for example.

Pretty site, although you're entering in a sector with a lot of competition!

I suggest you add Cntrl+V uploading of images from the clipboard; it's a great feature which a lot of sites have overlooked.

Access to the OS clipboard would require the use of Flash. I would like to stay away from that. We'll see what our options are. Thanks for the feedback!

Access to the clipboard are reasons why I still install apps like Grabbox, Tinygrab, etc (less steps I have to take). Hesitance over the use of Flash for a usability gain for the user seems like a silly sort of squeamishness (look at bit.ly's copy to clipboard buttons).

The Mac and Linux client is coming soon so. This should solve that problem. We do not plan to introduce Flash on our site.

FYI. It can take zip files but is limited to 32MB. Looks good. Good luck!

Yup! 32MB for guest uploads. And if you have an account can go up to 256MB.

I don't get what makes it better than like a Minus? I would like one of these drop.io replacements to offer encryption or passwords to get to their shared content. Similar to what dropsend does.

Our aim, as mentioned on the top of every page is to let our users "Upload and share your files, beautifully." Key word being 'beautifully'. I really don't see how Minus fits into that...? Looking at their front page, it's all a bunch of noise.

Any reason why I would use this instead of http://www.dropmocks.com? Dropmocks seems to upload significantly faster for me as well.

What are the limits of dropmocks? It doesn't tell me any where on the site.

I've been using it for ~6 months and have never encountered any limits, file size or bandwidth. It is open source too: https://github.com/glenmurphy/dropmocks

I like the notion of prompting the user to drop their files on something evocative (a castle) rather than a cold generic empty box. Good intro UX, clever take on zero-conf.

Too clever perhaps. Zero UI doesn't mean No UI. I also had to read the About to figure out that I could drop a file onto the castle wall, which btw failed to do anything (I assume I need a login). What's missing is something called "Affordance" in UX nomenclature.

Is this a neat side project or a potential business? I've run into 50 simple, drag / drop file uploading websites, some (somehow) with funding, like Min.us

We just made it as a side project originally, for ourselves. But then it started to spread, so we opened it up for everybody and just seeing where it takes us.

The social media buttons to share an uploaded file don't seem consistent. Mail pops up on mouseover, reddit and FB on click. (Using Chrome)

Yes, we're currently using ShareThis until we have our in-house solution completed. So we have to live with their incompetencies until then.

HTML5 drag and drop? Great front end.

Yup! Thanks.

Why Castle.so over Cloud.app?

You can upload a file in one step with Castle. No need to register. We're also making an awesome Mac OS X and Linux client to go along with our awesome service. :D

I don’t understand. How are you going to pay for all the traffic?

Going to introduce a freemium model soon.

Sorry for the repost but the other submission seems to be dead.

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