This year will, I think, be remembered for many things. But on the technology front, it will be the year that collaboration systems really started to hit their straps. Continuing that trend of improvement and evolution, Dropbox has revamped the iPad experience for their collaboration tool Paper as well as adding Outlook calendar integration and the ability to link events from the Google or Outlook calendars to notes.
The revised app now has a new navigation pane on the left with the software also updated to fill the iPhone X’s larger, weirdly shaped display. Rather than leaving black bands at the top and bottom, it now fills the “horns” on other side of the newest iPhone’s camera and mic cutout.
Editing tools have been reorganised but, disappointingly, I couldn’t use an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro to draw pictures or scribble down handwritten notes. This is something an app called Paper really needs to address.
Notes can be linked to events in your calendar. So, when you’re in a meeting and start creating a note, information from your calendar automatically appears in the new note. This has been around for Google calendar users but it now supports Outlook as well.
Dropbox is trying to expand their footprint beyond their core, and still best in the market in my view, file sync and share service. And while I think they do that better than anyone else out there, the gap between what Dropbox offers and that of OneDrive, Google Drive and even the improving iCloud is narrowing. Hence their move to developing APIs for developers, and creating apps such as Paper that integrate with Slack is a strong sign they intend to be more than a utility storage service provider. Paper is still a work in progress. And whether it is enough to compete against the embedded user bases of tools like Evernote, OneNote and other similar apps remains to be seen.
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