Hopper: Stop emailing yourself notes, files, and images | Hacker News Reader

Hopper: Stop emailing yourself notes, files, and images

gethopper.com

104 pointsendtwist76 comments

On the one hand, this is cool... on the other hand, I'll never use it (sorry).

I email stuff to myself on gmail because I can have thousands of things in there that I can instantly find via powerful search. And I'm fairly confident that 5 years from now they'll still be in there and just as easily discoverable.

While Hopper's UI is certainly better than email attachments in gmail currently are, I suspect Google will rectify that on their side much faster than Hopper will rectify my previously mentioned primary two concerns about the data I'm storing.

As others have already mentioned, seamless integration into email would go a long way toward getting me to use this at all. Augment instead of trying to replace is a much better strategy here.

No problem, Hopper might not be for you. However, I've gotten a lot of requests re: emailing updates, so I will consider it!

Let me say, though, that I absolutely respect your privacy and have no intention of looking at your data. It's as private as you want it to be. I'm also happy to put this in the TOS.

Exporting is another story as its easier said than done. Emailing you the pastes periodically (optionally), however, may alleviate that problem.

> Let me say, though, that I absolutely respect your privacy and have no intention of looking at your data. It's as private as you want it to be. I'm also happy to put this in the TOS.

OP's issue wasn't so much privacy as it was permanency, as I read it. So using Gmail, I can rest assured that in five year's time my documents will still be around, just as they are today. Whereas with a new service, who's to say what lies in store for it? What if you pivot? What if you're acquired? Unfortunately a service like Gmail wins in this context.

I used to think that about email services, too. Then one after another they changed their terms when I wasn't looking, and deleted data I thought was safely stored.

What ever happened to 'your own hard drive'? Is there some reason people can't use that for storage? I have a VPS that I use as a file intermediary. I'm highly confident that, and my backups, will be there in 5 years.

For most users, "your own hard drive" is a terrrible solution. They do not have a VPS that they use as a file intermediary (they don't even know what a VPS is), and they don't know how to keep backups, and if they did the backups would probably be corrupted or out of date.

This is the miracle of web hosted software for most users. It's also what makes Dropbox so special.

I know plenty of people who use portable hard drives, flash drives and writable optic media as a backup... I don't see many downsides in that, barring catastrophic loss (which can happen to second party storage as well, though they do tend to be more professional about being careful).

Of course, a burned DVD isn't going to let me access my file from the office and at home unless I take it with me, so there are drawbacks.

Exactly, and this IMO is the problem with /any/ new service that aims to do this. It's a known problem. Solutions have been tried before. I wish this company the best of luck, but I don't have high hopes for this getting popular.

IMO, Dropbox and similar services are the first real viable replacement for e-mailing files to yourself.

I opened the site with Opera, and JavaScript turned off. It went into a loop of redirecting me between the root and /you.

Opera && javascript turned off == I don't care about this "web" thing.

So, I, for one, don't exactly care about what happened in your tin-foil crazy edge case.

Wow.. Wasn't expecting that kind of response.

To be frank, I also expected to mainly get downvotes from my spur of the moment response.

But the gist of what I was trying to convey is:

It's 2011. The web is inherently tied with javascript.

(The "progressive enhancement" thing in respect to lack of javascript doesn't hold after Ajax and the so-called "Web 2.0", ie since 2005).

Turning js off AND using a left-field browser, is probably pushing it too far, and you don't really get to complain about broken functionality after that.

Look, I'm not counting on web developers providing me with a site that's fully functional without JavaScript. That would be stupid. I have no trouble enabling JavaScript for specific sites that need it.

Opera is a great browser and has good support for HTML5 and CSS3. In fact, since I refuse to live without snappy Mouse Gestures, I don't even really have a choice in my primary browser.

Also, redirecting a browser somewhere without using JavaScript (since it was disabled) should be a reasonably simple operation.

And finally.. Tinfoil? All in all, there was absolutely no reason for that personal attack of yours. So yeah, try to behave.

Well, re: tinfoil, you'll have to admit that turning js off is a little on the tinfoil side...

What's the supposed benefit of breaking 80% of the modern web?

Using lower resources?

Sites not "tracking" you with cookies?

Better security?

I second that, this service looks good.. but atleast for now I'wont be using it.

Reason being: - Lot of believe in GMail that they will be there for years to come, and service will be available when we need it. - It not only contains notes / passwords which I send, it also have passwords / login info sent by various services. So anyways, I'll have to use it. - Gmail is a default tab always opened, why would I need another tab for a subset of task.

Anyways I think there will be many takers once seamless integration into email is done.

You might also like Google Docs, which is searchable, permanent, and lets you share what you upload. (And, if you buy more storage for it, you can also your extra space for Gmail.)

Big fan of google docs, gmail.

However, I would like to see google docs make my email a subset of my document collections. At end of the day an email is a document (with more documents, attachments).

> via powerful search

I do the same but google mail's search is not really useful as it does not let you match substrings so it can be really, really frustrating unless you meticulously manage your inbox with tags.

You might like my bookmarklet, cctome.com

I have DropBox, EverNote, and Springpad, on the multiple devices I use: work/home PC/laptop and smartphone.

The above tools serve to keep notes and files. Nevertheless I continue to use e-mail as an archiving tool because: - it pops up unread in my inbox for later processing. If I want to use it on a specific device, I can just leave it unread until I have access to the right device. - more importantly, email is ubiquitous, and I can have somebody else email me a file.

I still need convincing on what problem Hopper solves for me that the other tools don't. That said, trivially easy drag-and-drop file storing is cool, and I for one welcome our so-simple-my-grandma-can-use-it usability overlords.

I found that I regularly emailed myself notes and files for later processing, and they'd then get lost in the inbox. I wanted to be able to search my notes (and only my notes), as well as easily share them with one or several people.

Every other one of those services got me partway there but felt like they were lacking (no web search, burdensome to use, etc). Paste and forget until later - no more than 20 seconds to save something.

Notifications and device web apps are coming, too. Does that help?

I just add "note:" to my emails and then I have a gmail filter that tags the messages based on that and the sender's address.

On a similar note, I have a gmail filter that picks up when the source and destination email addresses are the same, i.e. when I send an email to myself, tagged under 'self mail'.

I've been meaning to build this exact same thing for some time. Upon opening my inbox it goes "me me me me(2) me me(5) me". I found the same thing; Dropbox, Evernote, and everything else could provide the same sort of thing, sure, but they just don't fit in with the way I work. I don't want to tag things, or add a title, or install an extension or an app.

Open window, ctrl+v, move on.

One suggestion, grouping of similar items. If I find multiple links or have notes I want to correlate I usually end up replying back to myself so it stays in the same thread.

For the record, I just e-mailed the Hopper link to myself.

Nothing actually prevents you from doing the "Open window, ctrl+v, move on" with Evernote. At least mac version has a global shortcut for creating a new note in a default notebook e.g. "notes" and it also does search. No need for tagging if you don't want to.

Depending on which e-mail application/web-service you are using it is generally fairly easy to search by both sender and text content at the same time.

Here's a suggestion. Integrate with Evernote and you'll gain customers that use Evernote as an all encompassing data store but would like a filter for stuff like this. Also free exposure on Evernote Trunk.

Good point, perhaps Hopper should email the user with the file.... basically make an easier entry point to the email --- even if the email basically serves as a reminder. Hopper could even allow you to input when you want the email to come, if it's something you want to use later on

People use email because that's still the only ubiquitous app.

I use Dropbox and Pinboard and Instapaper. I still find myself emailing things to myself because whatever iPad app I'm using doesn't yet integrate to any of those but does have email.

Email also exists on all sorts of devices that don't support apps.

That said, nice job - the simplicity and UX is great.

The reason I (and I suspect, many others) email stuff to themselves is that I expect my email to be there with me years from now. Websites like these come and go, and I wouldn't want to build up a collection that might just disappear a few months (or maybe a few years) down the line.

I remember collecting links for years on del.icio.us before Yahoo decided to shut it down. Then I moved everything over (though it's nice that del.icio.us made it convenient to move my data over, it's still a hassle) to trunk.ly, but now they have been acquired by delicious.com and will be shutting down too. In the end, I find that email is more reliable and easier to search (searching on Gmail is pretty easy)

One way such a website could be useful is if it did the job of emailing me the stuff I collect (or some other similar solution) so that I'm still guaranteed to have my collection, but it's possible to browse it in a better interface on this website.

TL;DR - This is a well-done website, but I'll be hard-pressed to use it unless it also solves the reliability problem.

It should be trivial technically (but not sure about the biz model) to allow for itemized and tagged export to a designated email address. If they do that, I will consider using them.

I'm in the same boat. I love my pinboard and dropbox, but I still email documents to myself. Mainly work documents, and since I consider my dropbox a personal account, I don't store work documents on it, or install it on my work machine.

Also, rave for pinboard: It hits that spot for me of doing one thing, doing it well, and not trying to do any other goddamn thing for me. It is $10. I think it's worth it.

+1 on pinboard. I think they solve the saving things for a longer period of time. They also seem to be self sufficient. But even pinboard suffers from the one man hit by a bus problem.

There are some odd things in the Terms and Conditions:

"Pasting any of the following is forbidden and a violation of our terms of service: ... copyrighted works or links to copyrighted works that you do not own" Virtually everything on the internet is under copyright, so this forbids links, a primary purpose of the site.

"Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials (information or software) on Hopper's web site for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only." I don't know if I'm reading that right, but it sounds like you can't get your stuff off the site :-/

After an unmanageable number of note-to-self emails — I mean, just imagine having to sort through an inbox of hundreds of things you sent yourself with the expectation of following-up later — I finally transferred them all to Evernote and haven't looked back. (Really, I can't recommend using something like Evernote or OneNote more for the purpose of brain dumps).

The problem I see with solutions like Hopper is that they aren't ubiquitous. I have to load a website and deal with whatever interface they've decided is the 37signals-esque simple-is-best approach to solving a problem that only matters because their execution pretty decent and for that reason I come back to it more than once... At least with Evernote I can throw shit in, in whatever format I prefer, categorize it, and then come back to it later when I feel like looking at what I thought was so rad at the time. It's no wonder so many people do this over email.

Back when I had dial-up and wasn't online all the time, my solution to this problem was Notepad. Yes, plain old .txt. THAT's how to get shit done. Don't matter what fancy tools you use.

(No offense, Hopper...)

The last time I emailed a piece of text to myself was to send an api key from my computer to my iPhone so it could be used in an app. It is a one time operation where I can access the data quickly and the text remains sufficiently private.

With Hopper, I don't know if the text will be shared publicly on the web, and if I can rely on it, what if the server goes down or the logs are read or stolen?

I have been thinking about solving this since https://www.xkcd.com/949/ and one thing which I think most file services get wrong is that they practically require you to write down (or email to yourself) the link to the file. I don't want http://gethopper.com/$hexadecimalgibberish. I want http://gethopper.com/meaningfulfilename If I am trying to send the file to myself because I will be on a different computer, how does this do me any good? Allowing me to make it http://gethopper.com/reallyimportantfile then I will remember the URL and I can just put it into the URL bar instead of going to gethopper.com first.

A nice solution to avoid namespace collisions while allowing users to create their own shortening URLs is to use their username as a subdomain (e.g., bcjordan.gethopper.com/meaningfulname).

Also:

* accept file and submissions by email: subject = optional shortener key, body/attachment = content

* slap a sign up with Facebook button on it

And one more thing... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEgk2v6KntY

Haha. I pasted some random text, hit "shorten link", and changed one character (out of the two-character-long shortlink) ... ended up with http://www.wtfeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fat-black-g...

I created a simple notepad for personal use. It's a textbox that syncs to my server. I have a bookmark to it on my Kindle as well as a notepad widget on the new tab page of Chrome. It can also be accessed from my phone (any device with a browser, really).

When I'm on my computer, it's there every time I open my browser. Anywhere else, It's just a few clicks away.

That seems to be enough for me as I rarely need to sync files, and when I do, I have dropbox.

Edit: Also thought I should mention that before I created my own solution, I used Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com/) for the webapp and iOS app. Since then they've added an API and have a few other apps I think.

Say more about this, please? Is it a single text box?

Sure, here's the source: https://gist.github.com/1609919 Also requires jQuery.

I access it like this: http://domain.com/notepad?key=yoursecret

The JS checks to see if the contents of the textbox has changed, and if it has, it makes a POST request via AJAX to the server that saves it to a text file.

Thanks so much for that! I also added in a Ctrl+S capture because I have an irritating habit of pressing it! Kudos!

Mind sharing your code for that? I think I tried implementing that originally but I could never get it to work.

I just used the shortcut.js library.. You can find it here : http://www.openjs.com/scripts/events/keyboard_shortcuts/

How about sending also an email to my own inbox from every share which links to the content? Could be a good way to keep users getting back if I could just enter my email easily when trying it out.

You've certainly identified the problem, but I don't know if your proposed solution make people like me switch off of spamming one's inbox. I've already tried to switch off to RememberTheMilk, but email was just too easily accessible and too ubiquitous, something I look at all the time. I'd need a whole separate screen just to keep track of what I want to do in RTM.

It seems like a cool idea, but as time has gone on with hosted apps I always find myself now asking this before I sign up:

How will you make money to stay in business?

If you can't answer that, and you don't, I'm extremely hesitant to sign up. Personal opinion, of course.

Great work and a great first start. One thing that I find that is still missing from file-sharing is to share your stuff with people in your close vicinity. I often run into cases when I just need to quickly share images, code fragments, links, etc. with another person sitting in the same room. I can use chat (but I generally don't like going on chat while working -- too distracting), I can email (which I often do) or use a service like Dropbox (but that means you have to upload and download files). An easy clipboard that can be sharable and accessible quickly would be very useful, at least for me. Just a thought.

Try Ge.tt

Is it 'Hopper' or is it 'Get Hopper'?

Ok, so by the title of this post, and the title on the site's front-page, I can see it's meant to be "Hopper".

But the site's URL is 'gethopper' and if you view one of the links created by the site there's the red 'Get Hopper' button on the top left.

Both of those things suggest the site is called 'Get Hopper'. To the user, what else is 'Get Hopper' meant to mean? You don't see "Get Google" or "Get bit.ly" (along with http://getbit.ly) etc. It's a little confusing.

Just thought you might like to know.

If you add a hot key that allows the user to automatically upload the file/image etc. it would save steps and differentiate you from email.

I'd probably use it, and may even pay for it depending on the price.

EDIT: Just because I am price sensitive doesn't mean others are (don't price it low on my comment). You also may have some lockin with this since you will have their files so keep that in mind when pricing.

I made something like this for my friend when I wanted to try out the drag/drop API. One thing I also did was give him a little bookmarklet with his hashed password that he could drag into a "login" box so he could quickly log in without typing his username and password every time. You may want to try something like that for quicker logins.

It looked something like...

hisusername:19fij12dio7giw3

I generally am active about keeping my inbox clean so anything in there is important, if its not then I delete it as I prune it everytime I check so not sure this would really be all that useful but for some people it may be, if they're too lazy to categorize / archive emails though I doubt they are going to want to use an extra app just for this.

it doesn't seem to work for me in Safari 5.1.2. Does it require Flash? I very intentionally do not have Flash installed.

I don't see any Flash. It seems to be implemented in javascript.

killer feature for me:

screen capture to clipboard, paste to hopper, and its already uploaded and shareable. i need this like 4 times a week. i would push to buy it at work if it was priced right and based on our existing google apps, so safe for proprietary data.

If you use a Mac http://getcloudapp.com/ does something similar, Clipboard capture of screenshots and adds the link to clipboard once the upload is done.

Yeah, CloudApp (Mac), TinyGrab (Universal), and Droplr (Universal) are all great products that provide this functionality. For example: http://d.saew.it/ocSW

I use screensnapr for that (http://screensnapr.com) and have it working with S3, so I hit CTRL+1, highlight and then it's on S3 in seconds: http://citricsquid.screensnarp.com/mmaeme.png

If you're a dropbox user, check out http://grabbox.devsoft.no/

I use Skitch (OSX), and then one-click send the file to flickr. Simple.

On KDE, when you take a screenshot, you can choose to send it to Flikr, email, IM or a bunch of other services immediately. This includes Picasa which might be part of google apps (I don't know).

Try Snaggy (http://snag.gy/), it's exactly just that.

You might want to know that www.hopper.com is very well funded and launching soon. I think you should rename your project... http://www.crunchbase.com/company/hopper

This needs to email the entire thing to me once per week before I use it, because I won't start using it if I'm not sure that it will be there in 6 months.

A big benefit for a user like me would be how to integrate it into my day to day workflow. A chrome/firefox extension would really go a long way.

Does anything in your privacy policy prevent you from looking through user pastes? It appears to me the answer is no, but IANAL.

You might want to try wishtunes on the appstore for iPhone as a way to capture snippets of text.

I really need this for my phone. Having it as a Share option would be great.

A mobile version is coming soon. I'm just as eager as you are to use it on my phone.

I like this.

Make items unique per user though to save yourselves a lot of trouble.

also check out http://ge.tt

I met these guys at SeedCamp final round. Looks like a very good file sharing product

And yet another chrome-only website.

guilty as charged. I do it almost everyday. very simple concept. UX is great.

wow this is perfect for me, would be great if there was an iOS app as well!

Or use dropbox

Reply on news.ycombinator.com