The Dropbox iPhone App is Out | Hacker News Reader

The Dropbox iPhone App is Out

blog.getdropbox.com

154 pointsjmonegro36 comments

Good software sells itself. Last night I had a bunch of musicians over and at some point they wanted to share their gig videos with some of the people there; I cracked my gf's laptop open and copied the video to My Dropbox folder, right clicked and copied the URL, then sent it to everyone. The audience had to do a double take, got of their seats and everyone leaned over the laptop to see me do it again. Instant AWE!

I must have increased dropbox membership by 8 people last night :-)

I hope you remembered to use referral links! 8x250mb = 2GB of extra space :)

Note: it requires iPhone OS 3.1.

If you're like me, and you've been holding onto 3.0.1 because it allows you to tether, you're out of luck.

Unless there's a material reason to require 3.1, I really hope they drop it down to 3.0x. Comments on the blog announcement seem to show a lot of people in the same boat.

Drea discusses 3.1 here: http://blog.getdropbox.com/?p=102#comment-17809293

It looks like they've (temporarily?) disabled the comments. Do you happen to have a cached copy of what he said?

> Under 3.0.1 if you record video from within the Dropbox app that video couldn't be saved to your iPhone photos directory, so if your upload was interrupted for any reason the video would be lost.

Finally, my baby is born!

We'd love it if you could Digg this article too!!

is the mother drew or arash?

Excellent job

Quick request re viewable file types - The app correctly recognises .h files as C, and lets me view them, but not .m files. Would it be possible to add .m files as well?

I have a similar request, but for viewing .asm files as assembly code.

Perhaps the option to view unknown files as plaintext?

You should create a new plan geared toward people who use it mainly in their iphone. I can see something like this:

"Pro iPhone 16 for $3.99 per month"

I'm sure gonna be your first customer for this plan :)

While iTunes was loading, I was wondering if the app would be paid or free. I started calculating mentally, what I would do if the app was paid - thought, okay, for 99cents I'd get it. On reflection, I'd get it for 9.99, but I'd post a nasty HN comment about them. For 19.90, I'd have said no way.

By this time, it had loaded, and I saw it was free. I was like - these dudes are pretty good dudes. Free, yarr? Nice!

And then my iTunes popped up and told me that 3.0 was not a high enough version. C'mon dudes, jailbreaking is not that easy for the latest versions, I intentionally stay a version behind.

they didn't support 3.0 because of missing capability that caused problems.

Like what? The 3.1 SDK did not bring much more in that an app like dropbox would need.

"The choice to go with 3.1 was because of a limitation with 3.0.1. Under 3.0.1 if you record video from within the Dropbox app that video couldn't be saved to your iPhone photos directory, so if your upload was interrupted for any reason the video would be lost. With 3.1 we can save the video to your photos on the phone, so if the upload fails you still have a copy and can attempt to upload again.

My apologies for the inconvenience, but when it comes to data loss, we always have to aim for the safest option." - http://blog.getdropbox.com/?p=102#comment-17809293

Their plan seems to be, give stuff away for free, charge for more storage. I would have been surprised if they charged for the iPhone application..

Great job. How was the approval process?

I noticed that you are lacking some of the functionality available at getdropbox.com. A quick suggestion is to have a link available from the settings panel. Also, put up your referral program! Have a button for that: "Invite a friend, get 250 MB"

This just kicked out iTunes Remote from its position in my "bottom 4." Great viewer that can read a LOT of different formats (pdf, doc, docx, ppt, xls, html, rtf, mp3, mov, mp4, etc [1]). Interesting 'Favorites' category.

This is basically a better version of dropbox (previews are actually faster than downloading and opening different apps). Just......awesome.

[1] https://www.getdropbox.com/help/80 (supported formats list)

Does this use your (soon to be public?) api? If so, any news on when it is going to be available?

Awesome, and free too. $9.95/mo now feels like a bargain.

Awesome app. Trying to thumb through PDFs hundreds of pages long has me thinking that it may finally be time for a 3GS.

In the meantime, any chance of a 'go to page' button?

It'd also be nice if the scroll-position was saved when you close the application.. When you reopen the file, it's always back to page 1..

The app works simply and beautifully. Reminds me of their web-client. A perfect extension of their services.

I don't think I could ask for anything else. Thanks DropBox.

digg us please? ;-) http://digg.com/software/Dropbox_iPhone_app_finally_released

Very nice! One feature request to add to the pile - it would be great if you could remember which page of a PDF I was last on.

bloody well executed. love the tutorial that first loads up as a pdf.

As pointless as this post is, I have to say that Dropbox is one of my favourite applications around. It's truly the epitome of "Just Works".

That said, I'd love it if they introduced a lower price plan—I want to give them money, but I don't need the big plan (I'm thinking more in the realm of $2/month for 5GB or something).

When you say that it synchronizes the photos + videos on the iPhone, that includes ones taken using the iPhone's camera? How much latency would there be (minus actual transfer time) between capture and dropbox availability?

Does it use the native push notification API for syncing photos + videos from Dropbox to the device?

For Apple users, how does this compare to MobileMe/iDisk (Apple provides a free iDisk app for iPhone)?

It's free (unlike iDisk), and in my experience Dropbox sync on the desktop is a hell of a lot faster and smoother.

Obviously it doesn't provide the other features MobileMe does, like syncing Preferences, KeyChains etc. But I'd be a very happy customer of MobileMe if iDisk worked as well as Dropbox does.

Awesome! Huge improvement over using the web client. One feature request, and I don't know if this is in line with your vision for the app, but it would be awesome if you could edit plain text files from within the app itself.

Congrats guys, I finally upgraded myself to a pro account just this morning.

Wow, quite a wide range of available file types:

http://www.getdropbox.com/help/80

These look like the file types natively supported by the iPhone.

excellent work. love it. Like the favorite feature. works really smoothly.

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