

Dropbox (YC 07) announces mobile API (and apps for iPad, Android) - jrnkntl
http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=492

======
minouye
Just downloaded the Android app and I'm reminded of why I like Dropbox to
begin with. It's simple, straight-forward, and does what I want it to. This
app is no exception.

~~~
e40
How do I put all the photos on my droid in my dropbox? That should be simple,
but I can't figure it out.

------
brlewis
I'm still looking forward to a non-mobile API, but I'm doing my best with the
CLI. Here's an email I got last night from a user of <http://ourdoings.com/>

That was trivial to set up (I already had dropbox, which is partly why I chose
to use it to upload the latest set of photos). Your directions were easy to
follow, and the email confirmation came within minutes.

I dropped the photos into the shared folder, went to dinner, and when I came
back, everything was transferred over.

thanks,

TJ

------
ugh
Great product and at the moment all the rage with the lecturers at my
university (small university in Germany). I guess it’s the file format
agnosticism, the flexibility and the ease of use. Also a good way for them to
exploit students and get their 250MB :)

(You would really think university IT could provide their own solutions but
they just can’t compete. We use Dropbox, Google Docs, Wave and Doodle all the
time. And Gmail, so as to not be limited to 200MB.)

~~~
jackowayed
Do you really expected university IT to provide comparable solutions? Even the
biggest university IT department is providing the stuff to maybe 50k people,
and as long as it more-or-less gets the job done, they keep their jobs and
don't really care that it's not spectacular.

Dropbox is providing the service to 5M people, and the whole business is built
on it being spectacular. The economies of scale mean that they can afford to
make tiny improvements, and they have serious incentives to make it as great
as possible; otherwise, they go out of business. (In fact, otherwise, they
would have gone out of business long before they made it to 5M users.)

Good OSS can fix this to an extent--if someone started a really good host-
your-own Dropbox project, every university could use it, getting you similar
scale when it comes to coding it, so people would contribute from all over to
make it great, and the IT at each individual university would just have to
deploy it and update it as it improves.

~~~
soult
I'm sorry that you go to such a crappy university then.

Where I study, IT staff try to be use- and helpful, and not just to keep their
jobs.

~~~
jackowayed
I'm just saying that to make something as seamless and all-around good as
Dropbox takes some serious work. Not only do IT people have little incentive
to reach that level of perfection, they often aren't really coders and
wouldn't be able to get a budget through that gave them enough man-hours to
have time to make something like Dropbox. It's not worth it to the university,
in general, to pay the full development cost of an extremely well-done
implementation of a complex, nonessential system. The economies of scale
aren't there.

And I'm still a few months away from college. It looks like Stanford has some
pretty good systems overall, but just as a datapoint, the design of Axess (the
system that appears to handle pretty much everything--course signup, financial
aid, etc) is much uglier (and a little harder to use) than any commercial site
I use. It gets the job done, it probably dates back to when all sites looked
like that, and the people in charge of it don't have enough incentive to give
it a facelift.

~~~
ugh
My university has kick ass WiFi (Damn you WiFi and the constant distraction
you provide!), you can use a VPN client to get access to, e.g., free papers
anywhere in the world, the mail account is a bit low on space but works like a
charm and you never have to fool around with writing anything on dead tree at
some fixed location in space because you can do pretty much everything online.
And the IT department tries really hard to make it possible for you to access
all that stuff no matter which software or hardware you are using (that’s in
contrast to what might be the case in some corporate environments).

I can’t complain but it’s probably also true that something like powerful
tools for seamless online collaboration is outside the scope of university IT
departments.

(The university actually uses moodle which would offer some useful
functionality but not even the lecturers like it. Asked whether we should use
moodle to upload our stuff: _disgusted-look_ “Uhm, it would be nice if we
could use Dropbox, that’s a pretty cool service. Do you know it?” :)

~~~
viraptor
Ah the joy of Moodle... I haven't met one person who likes it (although I've
seen much worse systems - WebCT anyone?) It's amazing that people still want
to install it for anything serious. Although maybe there no alternatives
feature-wise?

------
RK
The only problem I'm having so far with the Android app (on 2.1/Nexus One) is
that whenever you view a picture in the Dropbox app it gets added to your
Android gallery. The other way around would be OK, but this way just clutters
up the phone gallery.

------
derefr
Anyone know what the API looks like? The documentation for it is behind the
invite-wall, I'm guessing.

------
tingley
It makes me happy to see how much success Dropbox is having. It's a great
product.

------
evo_9
Yeah these guys are top notch. Excellent product, and now this smart move to
further fill the storage void for mobile. Good work DropBox!

------
bmalicoat
Won't be surprised when these guys get bought out. Fantastic product,
implemented way better than anything any of the major players have.

------
Legion
Of _course_. Earlier today I go to Android Market, thinking "gee, the Dropbox
app ought to be out by now, right?". It was not, so I downloaded some 3rd
party thing.

Drive home, fire up HackerNews, and look what I see...

Ah well. As if I can really act like I'm mad for having another reason to
twiddle around on my phone.

------
grosen
iPad App works great and integrated extraordinarily well with the service. No
limitations as far as I can see.

~~~
cstuder
I especially am looking forward to use files stored on my DropBox in other
Apps (Like Air Sharing or Goodreader).

It's a nice way to get around the clumsy synchronization via iTunes.

------
mgz
Created an mp3 hosting/sharing website using this new Dropbox API:
<http://boomp3.com>

------
acgourley
Excellent, was waiting for dropbox to give my ipad a cloud filesystem! I'll
probably pay for it now.

