Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures?
To be honest, I read through that whole page and I really am not sure I understand what "Paper" is.
I'm guessing it's like slack + specialized components (lists/document snippets) and file sharing designed around collaborating on a product or more generally a project...
Mailbox was an acquisition. Carousel was launched by Dropbox, but it came out of their acquisition of Snapjoy.
The problem wasn't simply that they shuttered the services (particularly Mailbox), it was how they did it. Mailbox spent about a year with development completely stagnated. Essential features like searching were broken and Dropbox's response was "we're refactoring! Don't worry, big updates coming soon, please be patient!" And that went on right up until they said "Okay bye!"
Services get shut down. It sucks, but it happens. But stringing your customers along for a year knowing perfectly well that your product is not being worked on is pretty awful.
It's a very nice service, I've started to use it for personal notes instead of Onenote, but I have the feeling that MS will stay behind Onenote way after Dropbox has shut down Paper.
Possibly reposted in response to the recent release of Box Notes[1]?
My team uses Box, so all last week I saw multiple emails and posts about Box Notes, so I could be drawing a connection that isn't there. Either way neither Paper nor Notes seem useful to me.
I really like the idea but I just tried the Android app and is super buggy. Text formatting doesn't work, it seems impossible to delete docs... And that's just what I found in 5 minutes of use
Finally, they released google docs. I jest, buy I am going to give them (Dropbox) another shot. Google docs is very frustrating. From dumping me into an unorganized pile of text w/o folders to just enough features to make it complicated to do basic stuff but bot enough to do advanced...or even normal stuff.
Dropbox has done some annoying stuff w/ their offerings, but i'm going to try paper out and if I don't get burned after a few months i'll upgrade to paid.
My gripe with these is that after using Word, these feel rigid and not full featured enough. And only with Google docs do you get what realtime collaboration should feel like.
I used to work on Dropbox Paper, and I now work at Google (again) and use Google Docs for work documents (for obvious reasons) while I keep personal stuff in Paper.
IMO Paper's realtime collaboration experience is superior to Google Docs. I'm curious to know if you've tried it and what you find better about Google Docs?
Actually, I was thinking of Quip when I wrote that. Quip locks the entire paragraph that is being changed, so others cannot work on the same paragraph. This is less than ideal. I actually do think Dropbox Paper is pretty good for collab, so that wasn't initially fair. My favorite feature is seeing who contributed to which line of the document.
I do find both Quip and Paper more suited to notes than documents, however. Writing a formal doc feels odd when your defaults aren't 12 pt Times New Roman, but maybe that won't be a consideration in five years. After all, there's some dissonance in saying "this is too pretty to use."
I can smell a favored executive's pet project stink from all the way over here. And I'm not even pooh-poohing Dropbox - I love them and use them religiously.
I used the Office collaboration features last with Office 2013 on Windows, and they were quite primitive. Basically, the document is synced with OneDrive.
The online version of Office has realtime collaboration AFAIK.
We are using it all day every day at our offices, it's a superb shared Notepad that combines speed, simplicity, robust media features (such as embed, code blocks...), notification system, Dropbox integration and share-ability into a tight little package. Haven't looked back to Google Docs ever since.
After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.
Google Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs.
s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010:
> Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface.
I used Wave extensively with an international team for project management and we found it extremely useful. The main problem was i) Yes, you had to get around a new way of working that merbed previously seperate paradigms - ii) (the killer) performance in the browser was completely horrendous.
It was the cumbersome Web interface that was the main problem, rather (the execution) rather than the concept.
The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.
The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.
>The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.
As a long time user of hackpad, it's nothing more than a glorified document editor, and very simple at that, with meagre "shared editing" capabilities that we've had for decades, even in desktop apps.
(The main reason I stuck with it is it's faster to load than Google Docs, and I only care about basic editing).
> It's Google docs but instead of being aimed at producing documents for prints, it is aimed at producing document for online consumption (multimedia)
Honestly, not a bad idea when you think about it. It seems strange that we're still use word processors/pdfs in an increasingly post-paper world. The web, I think, solves a different problem, and in any case not everybody should have to be a web designer to be able to produce a good document for designed for computer-first consumption.
It was, more specifically, the online equivalent of a face book [0]. Which implies an answer to why name a product after printed media when it is not for print -- because it serves as an online equivalent or replacement.
However, a face book is a highly specific thing, where as 'paper' is about as generic as you can get - even wasps make it. Can I mop up a spill with dropbox paper? Make a hat out of it? Cut out a coupon? Make a saw[1] out of it?
Not to mention that it's far from the first product named 'paper' in our tech bubble.
I think the point is that it's not a printed medium. You can do anything you want with paper... It doesn't give restrictions to what you want to do. You can doodle, make a mind map, sketch an amazingly detailed human eye, or actually take notes and brainstorm in your meeting. Paper is flexible. Software is not. They think they've made a good attempt with "Paper" at providing that flexibility online.
Chrome, the browser, was born with the idea of reducing the amount of "chrome" (frames, controls and other UI elements) in the app. I guess developers like to have fun when naming their projects.
Seriously. I landed on the page, watched the intro, and the little animated wizard created a rainbow. I actually sat there waiting for the damn wizard to deliver me an "aha" moment, but he just kept creating rainbows. Hah! I scrolled down and still don't get it. I actually like the wizard, but @#$%^... why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does.
> why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does.
I like landing pages with lots of screenshots, showing how a problem is solved in a few steps. However, I tried to do that for my company and conversion rates dropped. So I had to give in to the marketing guy who was telling me to just focus on the benefits of using the product and not on how it solves it. Now our landing page has no screenshots and the conversion rates are great. Go figure.
screenshots mean nothing. Solve X with Y feature seems, to me, at least, to be best method to get people to convert.
Does anyone know the demographics of conversion-rates by age (within the same field) for their customers; I.E. if your a an [engineer] - how old are those that convert to [product] by [age]?
I'm not sure if it's really still alive, but it actually got opened up, not just killed: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ - rare for a Google product that gets the axe.
The use-cases that I see between something like Trello and Paper seem quite different. I'm using Paper so far to create an itinerary for an upcoming trip. It seems to be working quite well thus far. Displays on mobile nicely. Image layouts seem to be a bit clunky, but, to their credit doing it nicely is no easy task.
The problem is they are trying to use a name which has a widely understood meaning - Paper - and then attempting to redefine it but doing so by using it in sentences where the common meaning almost makes sense, leaving you in a state of partial confusion.
The problem is they are trying to use a name which has a widely understood meaning - Paper - and then attempting to redefine it but doing so by using it in sentences where the common meaning almost makes sense, leaving you in a state of partial confusion.
It's not terrible. Personally, since I write in Markdown, it's an excellent tool for my niche documents. It doesn't integrate with Jekyll, but it's close enough. Simplenote is another decent app that happens to have Markdown support, but the implementation isn't very good. No image previews, no tables, and on occasion it will outright mess up the formatting in `code blocks`.
Of course, I am very hesistant to put my full trust into Dropbox. Their Mac app has been known to work around security measures in macOS[0].
An another note, does anyone here have a suggestion for a good Notes app with Markdown and/or Jekyll support? Preferably one with a mobile app as well.
IMO all the current MD editors/previewers stink for some reason. I spent 10 min throwing together http://mrkdwn.pro - you can feed it any direct MD file URL and it will render it in Github flavored markdown. You can also directly go to a file like so:
I'm using Dropbox Paper since quite a while and I love it. For PCs it is completely browser based and therefore works nicely on every platform - no native apps needed. It has mobile apps. I cancelled my Evernote subscription and account on the spot.
The only real downside at the moment from my point of view is that it does not yet have an offline mode.
Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx.
A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before)
All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using Google Docs) try to tie the user as close to their eco-system as possible.
When ever I try to maintain documents for long term storage, markdown seems like the only good format. I've seen people talk about stuff like org-mode, etc, but they all lack the fluidity and the WYSIWYG nature of Google docs, docx etc. I'm talking about how markdown never actually stores pictures inside the document, but just links to them, and you'll have to use a specific application to view the rendered markdown, and a different one to edit or make new ones.
I'm interested to see that does everyone else use for documents? And please don't suggest docx+open/libre office. I'm still waiting for some of those applications to properly handle a big file and I don't want to wait so long for those applications to even open.
EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think I should clarify something. I'm looking for a WYSISWYG tool, like google docs/docx. I don't really have time to spend doing the edit->render->see where you went wrong->edit cycle. This really hurts productivity when you're editing large documents and increases the barrier for new comers. I do use LaTeX but only when I need ultra sharp looking documents with specific needs. I really like it, but only pull it out when I need to write a paper and want the output in PDF. Other times, it's really not worth the effort.
So formats which require me to render to HTML etc, are a no go. I'm looking into ASCIIDOC but even that looks like it's very similar to markdown. And by WYSISWYG, I mean I want to type, and press Ctrl+B to write in bold, and Ctrl+I for italic and right click to insert hyperlink and so on. Not use asterisks everytime whenever I want to make something bold. Sure it transparently to that in the background, but I shouldn't have to worry about it.
Only export though? I can't just edit the files in place with emacs, which is my preferred way to edit anything? I don't mind if all the collaboration stuff was only visible with whatever dropbox editing UI, I'd just like the freedom to edit with whatever tool I wish to use.
I've been playing with passing markdown+css file+image tree to: pandoc {options} -H file.css --self-contained. It base64 encodes the images directly into the HTML5. The css in file.css is wrapped in <style></style> and is inlined in the header. The result is a fat HTML file with all the basic bits to make an article included. Exact line: pandoc --standalone --toc -V "toctitle:'Title'" --self-contained --to html5 -H article.css -o file.html file.markdown. Image links in code: \ <-- escaped space to force inline image.
For the longest time (5 or 6 years, way longer than Electron) I have been puzzled as to why there didn't exist a document format for offline websites/apps, that are basically a zip file of HTML+CSS+images+javascript.
That way you could build simple, easily distributable multimedia documents and web apps.
This is close, but I'm thinking cut out the web tools part. Do we really have to depend on HTML and CSS (or other XML based format which needs a web browser to view) to make and edit a simple word document? I cringe thinking of the bloat that is introduced when using CSS and javascript to view text+pictures.
I haven't used it in a while, but most browsers allow you to go File->Save, and it'll save everything in a contained folder structure that should be easily zippable. Including all linked images/CSS/JS, with their references fixed for local-consumption.
That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.
Thanks for the reply. I could really see making great looking documents with this. Although the problem is we're using all these cli tools (I love them too) to edit them.
So the problem is when I try to edit them on a new computer or even online, there's no way for me to do it in most cases, and in when I actually can install packages for all that, there's some dependency management I have to do. One more thing, since the output in HTML file, I have to again use a full-featured(which means slow to open) web browser to render the HTML file.
I hear you on needing piles of CLI packages. Regarding the web browser, the pandoc HTML seems pretty basic, so even the lightweight GUI browsers will probably handle it correctly. Also, if you include the correct bits in each image link in the markdown, I believe the resulting HTML5 will render with your included image descriptions in a text-only browser.
Here[1] is the HTML 5 standard. It includes a lot of things that a word file would never need. You're correct about not needing a lot of the things that say a browser like chrome has. Can we still not achieve the same thing with something simpler?
I use AsciiDoc for my more complicated documents. It's a lot like Markdown, but with more options when I need them to do specific things with formatting my documents.
One of the problems is that people want different things from a "simple document format".
Some want rendering-agnostic structure, like Wiki / Markdown / Org mode, that emphasizes structure and text, with things like links, tags, etc.
Other want to print centered headers on level 1, and left-aligned for level 2, and body text with a particular font, with fragments in a different color, and pictures with text flowing around them, etc.
These two camps command different design goals. A format that makes one of these easy adds complications and edge cases to the other.
The funny thing is, the same people periodically need one tool and the other, and even want to mix them. Many of them would consider having two tools for these jobs superfluous, especially if paid. They'd rather bend an existing tool, because how hard it is to add spans of colored text? or collapsed sections? It's, like, a hundred lines of code!
Hence the modern office formats, tolerably doing a huge spectrum of things, none of them brilliantly, and hopelessly complicated.
I'm pretty happy with pandoc markdown, compiled to PDF or HTML using LaTeX or CSS for styling, which achieves both of those design goals. But I also want to compose my first draft in a WYSIWYG editor and send it to non-technical users for editing (with tracked changes), so I do almost all of my writing in Word. It's the user interface, not the file format, that I find limiting.
Docx is basically a zipped container for XML + embedded images. What if there was a .mz (zipped markdown) format that markdown editors would treat as a single file for the document + embedded materials?
I've been using Paper since October, and thus far it's been my favorite Markdown Editor. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of accepting inline markdown and then just getting out of the way.
Also, you can export from Paper to Markdown or docx. I've written a few of my github READMEs in Paper and then exported to Markdown and they've worked just fine.
The examples you've mentioned (ctrl-i, ctrl-b, insert hyperlink) all work just fine, as does pasting markdown directly into the editor.
-- I have nothing to do with Dropbox, except as a happy paying customer and a happy Paper user.
In case you're looking for a more wiki-like experience that supports internal links, markdown, and real-time editing check out https://www.nuclino.com (I'm a Co-Founder)
I can't believe they spent 3 years on this, I can do all this and more with Quip as a super performant native Mobile and native Desktop. The killing feature of Quip is it's ability to Mix, in a single document, an spreadsheet(most of what you'd use in Excel), formatted source code, images, todo-list, mentions & collaboration, version control and rich formatting. The desktop app is a mix of web and native, but is not a memory hog like a CEF app, it's pretty slick.
Yeah, sorry my bad, the table functionality is not nearly a replacement for spreadsheets, we have been using Numbers / Excel / Google Sheets and embedded those to the document if we have needed more robust data tables.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadTo be honest, I read through that whole page and I really am not sure I understand what "Paper" is.
I'm guessing it's like slack + specialized components (lists/document snippets) and file sharing designed around collaborating on a product or more generally a project...
The problem wasn't simply that they shuttered the services (particularly Mailbox), it was how they did it. Mailbox spent about a year with development completely stagnated. Essential features like searching were broken and Dropbox's response was "we're refactoring! Don't worry, big updates coming soon, please be patient!" And that went on right up until they said "Okay bye!"
Services get shut down. It sucks, but it happens. But stringing your customers along for a year knowing perfectly well that your product is not being worked on is pretty awful.
This is one of those distinctions without a difference.
Why on earth should that make any difference to the end user? Bottom line is they shipped them and then canned them.
My team uses Box, so all last week I saw multiple emails and posts about Box Notes, so I could be drawing a connection that isn't there. Either way neither Paper nor Notes seem useful to me.
[1]: https://www.box.com/notes
Dropbox has done some annoying stuff w/ their offerings, but i'm going to try paper out and if I don't get burned after a few months i'll upgrade to paid.
Paper seems like wave (not google docs), and you really need a spreedsheet feature to have a competitive product IMO.
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/11/google-team-dri...
My gripe with these is that after using Word, these feel rigid and not full featured enough. And only with Google docs do you get what realtime collaboration should feel like.
I used to work on Dropbox Paper, and I now work at Google (again) and use Google Docs for work documents (for obvious reasons) while I keep personal stuff in Paper.
IMO Paper's realtime collaboration experience is superior to Google Docs. I'm curious to know if you've tried it and what you find better about Google Docs?
I do find both Quip and Paper more suited to notes than documents, however. Writing a formal doc feels odd when your defaults aren't 12 pt Times New Roman, but maybe that won't be a consideration in five years. After all, there's some dissonance in saying "this is too pretty to use."
Genuine question. I'm asking about Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
The online version of Office has realtime collaboration AFAIK.
They took a ton of screen real estate just to show us pictures of people typing into non-descriptive text-editors and people use laptops.
s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010:
> Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface.
https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-g...
It was the cumbersome Web interface that was the main problem, rather (the execution) rather than the concept.
The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.
It's a small world. :)
As a long time user of hackpad, it's nothing more than a glorified document editor, and very simple at that, with meagre "shared editing" capabilities that we've had for decades, even in desktop apps.
(The main reason I stuck with it is it's faster to load than Google Docs, and I only care about basic editing).
The spiritual successor was OpenSocial gadgets, also now gone except in some corporate spaces.
At a certain level I wonder if this, like Google X, isn't more a recruiting tool than an actual product. Something to say "we do sexy things here".
These documents can be used for notes about ideas, documentation, business plans, etc., etc.
Kinda like webpages, but with an easy-to-write interface, collaborative chat, and easy user access management.
Honestly, I thought the landing page showed that quite well.
It did leave me questions about if documents are interlinked like a wiki, and where and how they drew data for the graphs.
Honestly, not a bad idea when you think about it. It seems strange that we're still use word processors/pdfs in an increasingly post-paper world. The web, I think, solves a different problem, and in any case not everybody should have to be a web designer to be able to produce a good document for designed for computer-first consumption.
Pretty weird to name it after a printed medium if it is not primarily meant for printed media.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
Not to mention that it's far from the first product named 'paper' in our tech bubble.
[1] https://youtu.be/rYfkhdKcEiE
Also: https://youtu.be/j5dHMB1eCmY
I like landing pages with lots of screenshots, showing how a problem is solved in a few steps. However, I tried to do that for my company and conversion rates dropped. So I had to give in to the marketing guy who was telling me to just focus on the benefits of using the product and not on how it solves it. Now our landing page has no screenshots and the conversion rates are great. Go figure.
screenshots mean nothing. Solve X with Y feature seems, to me, at least, to be best method to get people to convert.
Does anyone know the demographics of conversion-rates by age (within the same field) for their customers; I.E. if your a an [engineer] - how old are those that convert to [product] by [age]?
How is this any different than trello?
I would never use Trello for something like that.
Document-driven workflow management? Enriched-Wave-like collaboration tool?
BTW, why every. single. pitch. video. today has to have this huggy-feely-casual voice over?
Dropbox used to be good at simplifying things. If the landing page is this confused it doesn't bode too well Dropbox Paper.
It is really really hard to promote a basic text editor as something revolutionary.
Of course, I am very hesistant to put my full trust into Dropbox. Their Mac app has been known to work around security measures in macOS[0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12619722
An another note, does anyone here have a suggestion for a good Notes app with Markdown and/or Jekyll support? Preferably one with a mobile app as well.
http://mrkdwn.pro/#/?url=
and then add the URL to your MD file at the end.
Definitely not fully featured or anything, but a dead simple way to share and read markdown files on the go.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524866
The only real downside at the moment from my point of view is that it does not yet have an offline mode.
A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before)
All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using Google Docs) try to tie the user as close to their eco-system as possible.
When ever I try to maintain documents for long term storage, markdown seems like the only good format. I've seen people talk about stuff like org-mode, etc, but they all lack the fluidity and the WYSIWYG nature of Google docs, docx etc. I'm talking about how markdown never actually stores pictures inside the document, but just links to them, and you'll have to use a specific application to view the rendered markdown, and a different one to edit or make new ones.
I'm interested to see that does everyone else use for documents? And please don't suggest docx+open/libre office. I'm still waiting for some of those applications to properly handle a big file and I don't want to wait so long for those applications to even open.
EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think I should clarify something. I'm looking for a WYSISWYG tool, like google docs/docx. I don't really have time to spend doing the edit->render->see where you went wrong->edit cycle. This really hurts productivity when you're editing large documents and increases the barrier for new comers. I do use LaTeX but only when I need ultra sharp looking documents with specific needs. I really like it, but only pull it out when I need to write a paper and want the output in PDF. Other times, it's really not worth the effort.
So formats which require me to render to HTML etc, are a no go. I'm looking into ASCIIDOC but even that looks like it's very similar to markdown. And by WYSISWYG, I mean I want to type, and press Ctrl+B to write in bold, and Ctrl+I for italic and right click to insert hyperlink and so on. Not use asterisks everytime whenever I want to make something bold. Sure it transparently to that in the background, but I shouldn't have to worry about it.
How should whatever tool you're using handle the case when another person is editing the document at the same time as you?
That way you could build simple, easily distributable multimedia documents and web apps.
That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.
So the problem is when I try to edit them on a new computer or even online, there's no way for me to do it in most cases, and in when I actually can install packages for all that, there's some dependency management I have to do. One more thing, since the output in HTML file, I have to again use a full-featured(which means slow to open) web browser to render the HTML file.
[1]:https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Some want rendering-agnostic structure, like Wiki / Markdown / Org mode, that emphasizes structure and text, with things like links, tags, etc.
Other want to print centered headers on level 1, and left-aligned for level 2, and body text with a particular font, with fragments in a different color, and pictures with text flowing around them, etc.
These two camps command different design goals. A format that makes one of these easy adds complications and edge cases to the other.
The funny thing is, the same people periodically need one tool and the other, and even want to mix them. Many of them would consider having two tools for these jobs superfluous, especially if paid. They'd rather bend an existing tool, because how hard it is to add spans of colored text? or collapsed sections? It's, like, a hundred lines of code!
Hence the modern office formats, tolerably doing a huge spectrum of things, none of them brilliantly, and hopelessly complicated.
Also, you can export from Paper to Markdown or docx. I've written a few of my github READMEs in Paper and then exported to Markdown and they've worked just fine.
The examples you've mentioned (ctrl-i, ctrl-b, insert hyperlink) all work just fine, as does pasting markdown directly into the editor.
-- I have nothing to do with Dropbox, except as a happy paying customer and a happy Paper user.