A fresh new Dropbox on the web | Hacker News Reader

A fresh new Dropbox on the web

blog.dropbox.com

205 pointssiavosh47 comments

Very nice! I was a little concerned about the abundant whitespace, but after a bit of using it I can say it's quite an improvement. It feels much less like I'm using a webapp, and more like I'm simply browsing my files. Which is the way it should be.

Edit: The more I use it, the more I like this thing. It's hard to put my finger on it, but the small size of the old UI definitely made it feel a bit like a second-class, constrained tool compared to the desktop.

> the small size of the old UI definitely made it feel a bit like a second-class, constrained tool compared to the desktop.

Interestingly, my impression is exactly the opposite. The oversized new UI feels like a constrained toy to me, compared to my usual file manager(s).

On my desktop I can make icons 16px and easily manage hundreds of files and folders without even scrolling, or switch to a thumbnail view if I need to see larger pictures. The Dropbox web UI, on the other hand, has only one view option that seems ideal for neither documents nor pictures, and it doesn't make any use of horizontal space beyond the hard-coded 960 pixels. So it still feels too much like a website and not enough like a file manager application.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Large icons and bare-bones interfaces might make it easier for people to perform simple tasks on a small number of items. Besides, not everyone is looking for Finder/Nautilus/Windows Explorer when they open Dropbox on the web. In fact, I guess most people use one of those desktop apps to manage their Dropbox most of the time anyway.

Agreed. Now I'd rather manage my files with my local OS file manager instead of Dropbox.com (vs before the design change).

Sounds like they should have a toggle button:

Layout:

[ ] Old School

[X] New Hotness

(I like the new design if you can't tell)

If it really bothered folks (like me), we could always just write our own interface using their public API.

Am I the only one who doesn't use the DB web client ever? I've got the desktop clients on all my machines, and my mobile, and I use them just like any other directory on my computer, only now my files show up everywhere. I use DB just like an addition to my file system. I've even got some DB directories in my $PATH.

Having said all that, I didn't like DB's old design, and it was never completely intuitive for me to figure out how to leave a shared folder that was hoggin up my space...

I don't want to install the client on my work computer, so it's nice to have the web site.

They're about to get some competition soon from Google. GDrive ( http://www.geekwire.com/2012/google-drive-wild-screenshot-lo... ) CSS sprites are already on Google Docs:

https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/css/128155302... https://ssl.gstatic.com/docs/common/jfk_sprite40.png

.docs-icon-drive{left:-21px;top:-1460px} .docs-icon-drive-grey{left:-21px;top:-1481px} .docs-icon-drive-grey-hover{left:0;top:-1775px} .docs-icon-drive-grey-pressed{left:-21px;top:-2205px} .docs-icon-drive-hover{left:0;top:-21px} .docs-icon-drive-pressed{left:0;top:-1607px}

And the sprites in question highlighted: http://ppi.fi/gdrive.png

I ditched Dropbox for insync ( http://insynchq.com/ ).

I used Dropbox for about 3 years, but never could get past 4GB, after wasting time filling surveys and whatnot. On the other hand, the payment plans were way too expensive for me (at $100 per 50 GB). With insync I use my Google's account storage which is very very cheap (at $20 for 80GB).

Time and time again people begged Dropbox to provide a cheaper option (say, 25GB for 50) or to lower their prices, but they were never listened.

Now Dropbox space feels like hotmail 25MB limit when Gmail started.

Matt Cutts (of Google) replied

> Normally I just comment on webspam stuff and don't diss our competitors, or praise our products, but I feel the need to say that Gdrive is better. It's beautifully simple and it just works.

Maybe it’s just late at night and the ‘tonin is kicking in. I think Matt’s having fun with Dropbox about Google’s yet-unreleased competing product, but what’s the joke?

I think someone's just playing around using his name

Look at the profile

http://disqus.com/guest/8f1dc8d0613be097f161d62bf5488744/

Deleted comment

Pretty sure that's not actually Matt Cutts.

Personally I think the design is absolutely incredible - it's quite rare that I encounter UX so good it makes me smile.

Just look at the rainbow iconography! Perfectly captures the emotional response I've seen non-tech people have when they realize what Dropbox can do for them. Sure they could have gone with something more explicit, but each icon is labeled and it's a perfect way to add life to an interface that could otherwise be utilitarian.

It seems like all the design sense Google used to have has been picked up by Dropbox - and then some!

Ooh look, no hash URLs. I bet the HN community is pleased.

Does anyone have an older browser to see what happens when pushstate isn't supported? Does it fall back to hashes, or what?

hashbangs on IE9 e.g. https://www.dropbox.com/home#!/home/Foo/Bar

Where are they using hash urls? I'm not seeing that for my files

They used to before today. I remember the url's would be like /#::home or something along those lines.

Looks nice overall. A few thoughts: It would be helpful if folders showed a "Modified" date. I find the background image slightly distracting. Why not replace the word "document" with the type of document? It would be nice to have an option to see bigger thumbnails in photo folders.

I really don't like the rainbow for share. It seems very unintuitive. Very usable interface though.

Makes me think my files are off to the Castro.

Yes. I wonder what their reasoning for that was.

Come on guys, exercise your imaginative centers a bit. Rainbows are bright, colorful, playful, remind you of sunny days out at the park with your friends. It's not a huge stretch.

About as much of a stretch as using a unicorn for "delete", because unicorns don't exist.

I'm getting increasingly concerned that web UIs are trading away usability for design in Apple's wake, forgetting the part about "design is how it works".

My sentiment exactly. I didn't find the rainbow very attractive. I may have to make myself a browser extension to change it.

An amusing choice of titles here.

On the front page right now is '"Space Monkey" Dropbox Competitor Wins Launch, Has Already Raised $750K', and just below it, is this title ('A fresh new Dropbox on the web'). I was expecting this to be a post praising their new competitor.

Anyway, a redesign was badly needed for the web interface. The last time I used Dropbox on the web I remember questioning how this could be a multi-billion dollar company.

Very impressed with the new features. It looks great and is very usable for a web interface.

Do the new icons seem enormous to anyone else? It feels like a massive amount of space. I got the same feeling with the gmail redesign until discovering "compact" layout.

Can anyone figure out a way to make the list use space better?

Very nice! Just one little bug, the first item in a list gets covered by the title bar when selected and you can not longer see what it is. Edit: This seems to happen only after going into a folder first.

Looks OK but I liked the other one better :(. I can quite pinpoint what is wrong but I was very confused when the interface suddenly changed (I was actively browsing my dropbox when it happened), it felt as somehow the page didn't complete loading or that I was looking at a mobile version of the website.

One thing that did specifically irk me is that I could no longer see the file sizes of the different files. As someone who occasionally needs to micromanage certain files to save up space that was disappointing.

If you click the "Kind" column header a few times it will change to "Size" - it's not the most obvious, but at least it's still there. Unfortunately the column switches back to Kind when you navigate to a new folder though.

A cynic would say that's by design.

I like some of the new features but it's nothing that exceptional. I feel like they are afraid of shifting too much from the initial (great) product, to avoid losing the customers that will feel they're losing that sense of almost invisible client/service. It's an improvement but not really a fresh new Dropbox on the web.

One of the more interesting things I noticed about the new UI when it hit my account was that the usage meter that sat in the bottom left of the screen has now been hidden in a dropdown. Presumably this is so users will be more likely to hit their storage limit without noticing?

Nice UI but it would be great to have a "compact" setting (as in gmail). The text size is too big.

On my public folders that are visible to everyone there's a button labeled "Add to my Dropbox." If someone were to click this button would they get read-only access to that folder?

Do many Dropbox users see the dotfiles that are shared? Is that annoying to people? Is it useful to hide them by default, like OS X does?

Is there a way to download documents from the web (eg a pdf file) directly to my dropbox with a right klick and than "save as"?

Not yet. But apparently that's the big 2012 feature Dropbox has been working on.

wait, really? If you have the desktop client installed, you can just download it to dropbox like it's any other directory on your system. It's fantastic. In fact, I never use the DB web client.

Of course, that's been the #1 use case for Dropbox since they launched.

The point is that they are looking to create 'dropboxes' across the open web, so that you don't have to actually download stuff at your end first. So you could have a folder which you chose to NOT sync with your computer, but instead only used as a web-stuff repo in the cloud, for example. That use case doesn't exist today.

Ah, interesting. I guess I never messed about with syncing preferences, and just said 'everything, everywhere'.

If you look at the site from a certain angle a background image will be visible at the bottom, just noticed this.

A great improvement over the previous design, and more importantly it's approximately 100x faster to navigate.

what do you guys think of the keyboard shortcuts? probably not super discoverable but golden otherwise I think

Awesome. And it seems they're using Backbone.js.

Not trying to rain on Dropbox's parade (they offer a great service), but I switched to a TonidoPlug to keep my own data and have been very pleased. It's worth checking out if you haven't seen it and an interesting business model.

http://www.tonidoplug.com/

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