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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow, how are people using their "Public" folders? I'm honestly surprised at all this outrage.

I was unaware you could share any folder/file before so I just played around with it. From your file manager, right click any dropbox file or folder and select 'Get Link'. The browser will open and send you to a page displaying all those files and folders. You can copy/paste that link to anyone.

Is the only difference that in the case of linking to a single file, rather than a full directory, the link clicker now sees a preview of the file (with a big Download button) instead of downloading it directly.

Isn't that actually an improvement, so the linker isn't just blindly trusting and downloading a file from some random link? That seems ripe for abuse, if users got used to that mindset.

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It's a nice and simple way to serve a webpage or two. Here's an example:

I have a folder with an `index.html` and a `image.jpg` in it. The HTML file can reference that JPG by requesting `./image.jpg`, the browser will try to fetch it from the same directory — and it will find it. Also, the links to an users `Public` folder will not expire.

With the new'ish "share link" functionality, I can't do that, since every file is served from is own path, from its own preview page. To get that link, I need to query the API; to get the direct/media link, I need to query the API again, the resulting link will be different, and it will expire after four hours.

So no more dropping a mockup for a client in a folder, sending her the link to the `index.html` and be done with it. That's a step backwards. Yes, I could store the files on my own server, but that's besides the point.

I use dropbox a lot to send stuff to friends over IRC. Screenshots, save files, snippets of code. You can put up a HTML page that loads a SWF from your public folder, no worries. I have some music in there too and a HTML music player that points to the files so I have a simple music library on any computer with web access.

Sending you to a landing page instead of just serving up the content is unnecessary and disrupts all of these activities.

If you host an html file with a relative img tag in the public folder it will just work. If you do it with the get link method, you'd have to get a link for each resource. Public folder is really helpful for hosting sites that are in development that you want to share with your clients.

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