Discover the new Dropbox menu on your computer
blog.dropbox.com
blog.dropbox.com
1. The latest thing shared with me was a photo, and a thumbnail is shown. This photo happened to be nothing significant but what if it was a private photo? Now that photo shows up whenever I want to jump to a recently changed document using the menu (which I do often even before the update).
2. This might be a personal problem: it makes me a little uncomfortable that the program just added this new functionality to itself without asking me. Is it normal for me to feel this way? Or is this how it should be, and I'm just used to all my old programs (MS Office, Adobe etc) asking me for permission before updates? I mean honestly I like this update and I haven't had any dropbox new feature that I didn't immediately love (Except for the automatically ask me to import photos from my iphone feature) but what if they decide to remove a feature in the future... I guess since this is a subscription service I should set my expectations appropriately, that service will change, unlike buying Microsoft Excel for example which will just work and keep the old features until I buy the new version.
Anyway, why are you sharing private photos online? Seems like an idiot thing to do irrelevant of dropbox's horrendous track record.
And, yes this is the best method and should be in place everywhere, I always want the latest version of software and I don't want to be annoyed every time some bug fix is released.
For userware the only times silent updates become a problem is where there are significant i/o & bandwidth constraints, or if backwards compatibility is broken.
I also wish they had include a pause button at the bottom of the menu. It would be unobtrusive and the lack of one makes this seem like more of a downgrade for me.
That being said, an option to disable preview icons doesn't seem like a worthy use of time. After all, if you're signed into your Dropbox account on a PC, you probably have all of the data on that PC from Dropbox. If selective sync is on, an attacker could easily add folders as well. Security by obscurity isn't security.
I didn't say anything of the sort, I was saying its stupid to put stuff online if you don't want it on the front page of a newspaper.
Disabling thumbnails, while I see it as a pointless feature I don't see it as being very hard to do, perhaps if these porn syncers at work cry out enough, it will be in the next version.
PS: allowing anyone complete access to anyone else's "private" files isn't doesn't constitute a poor track record, its absolutely shoddy as hell and speaks volumes about their likely "fix" and attitude towards security practices in general.
As usual with linux they provide downloads like "dropbox_1.4.0_amd64.deb". So I went to the windows and mac os download page to look at what version the blog post was about (the blog did not say that it was 2.0).
Then I tried the link they have for the command line install: https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64
This actually downloads a dropbox that is versioned with 2.0. At least there's a file VERSION included that has 2.0.0 as its content.
The "gui" (tray context menu I guess) of course hasn't changed, it's still the same it was a long time ago.
edit: just updated, I'm not sure I like this new interface, I would like to at least see a button for pause/resume like before, having to go through the settings icon is incredibly annoying for something I use more often than the rest of the features. Maybe add rightclick to show the old menu or something like that?
It seems this change was to keep up with evernote's new dropdown?
Can I choose to not upgrade? For how long can I get away with that before DropBox's servers reject my client?
If a user can revisit a declined invitation and accept it, later, make this clearer. Still, I'd rather not have to remember to go and fish those out of the declined "list".