About a week ago, I received a press release letting me know that Dropbox was updating their style guidelines with new typefaces and colours. To be honest, I didn't think it was that interesting. But that new look is making an appearance in app and online updates now. And not everyone is happy.
Building an online service and API is a difficult business. Once you've actually spent the time putting it together, writing up good documentation and delivering something reliable and stable, you potentially have to support it for a long time. But not forever. In Dropbox's case, it pulled the plug this week on its original API, v1, leaving tardy developers -- and their users -- with potentially non-functional apps.
iOS: You might not want to upgrade to iOS 11 just yet, but you should update these top-shelf iOS apps.
This morning, Dropbox announced the release of DBX Platform. This is a suite of APIs and developer tools for building new capabilities on top of Dropbox that includes new integrations with Atlassian’s JIRA Software, Autodesk tools and Microsoft Outlook. I spoke with Dropbox's Head of Solutions Architecture Dan Iversen about the new features.
Dropbox has jumped on the two-factor authentication (2FA) bandwagon with changes to their mobile app. Now, when an attempt is made to log into your Dropbox account, a notification is sent to your mobile device where you can tap a button to authenticate your identity. There's no code to enter.
Teams is Microsoft's play in the competitive collaboration business. Like Slack and HipChat, it's a chat-based system. But as well as chat, Teams is about allowing coworkers to work together. Of course, that means being able to access content easily.
As part of Microsoft's increased openness to working with third parties, a new integration with Dropbox has been announced, so people can work together on files stored in Dropbox.
Earlier this month, I reported that Dropbox was adding their own point of presence (PoP) in Sydney to speed up local services. This followed similar moves in other territories. The PoP isn't a local storage facility but a proxy that is used to speed up sync performance back to the servers in US, which is where almost all Dropbox's storage capacity is located - there's also storage in Germany to satisfy EU data sovereignty requirements. But, it seems Dropbox's ambitions are much grander, as they are building their own private network to service customers.
Dropbox is giving Australian users a performance boost with the opening of a new local point of presence. Running their own dedicated equipment in one of Equinix's Sydney data centres, Dropbox's Dan Iverson, the head of solutions architecture APAC, said the new PoP will act as a proxy server improving performance for Australian users. It follows on the steps of similar initiatives in other regions.
One of the biggest hassles with having multiple computing devices is being able to access your data in the office, at home and when travelling. Back in the 1990s, when I started working in IT, Microsoft had a crack at this with the Briefcase feature that was part of Windows 95 but it was pretty poor.
By the mid to late 2000s, cloud storage services came to the fore, making it easy to access up to date versions of our workfiles wherever and whenever we wanted. But how do we use these services and get the most out of them?
If you're a longtime Dropbox user, you might have noticed that your Dropbox folder changed a little yesterday. That's because the Public folder is no longer public.
Dropbox has announced some new features to help teams in businesses collaborate better, include a new viewer info feature and Smart Sync for business customers. The company is also bringing Dropbox Paper, a tool that is like a stripped down version of Google Docs, out of beta and making it available worldwide. Here's what you need to know.
Some Dropbox users noted that some files they had deleted a long time ago on the cloud storage service had been resurrected. Dropbox has admitted that this was caused by a bug that prevented files from being completely removed from its servers. While trying to fix the bug, Dropbox accidentally restored the deleted files to user accounts.
If you tend to set up a new Mac the exact same way as your old Mac, you know how tedious it can be to go and download files, tweak settings, and mess around with various preference panes. Blogger Jacob Salmela shows of a way to use Dropbox to save all those settings.
Back in March, Dropbox made the decision to remove Public Folders for free users and in October, made it impossible to use HTML content in shared links. Dropbox will continue this lockdown next year, when it shuts off Public Folders for paying users also.
Movies and TV shows come and go on Netflix on a regular basis, which means you might be half way through your favourite flick when it gets yanked from the service. The solution? Buy all your own content and set up your own private cloud-based streaming service you can get at from any computer or device.
After adding a whole bunch of productivity tools to its online storage cloud service a few months ago, Dropbox has now brought more features to its iOS app. Here's what you need to know.
Mac: If you just upgraded to macOS Sierra and your Dropbox app is acting up, you're not alone. Even with the latest version of the app, some users are experiencing strange behaviour -- error messages, confusing syncing icons and so on. Here's what you can do to mitigate the annoyances.
Dropbox was reportedly hacked back in 2012. In 2014, hundreds of Dropbox passwords were leaked by an anonymous hacker. Now Dropbox is forcing password changes on anyone with a password older than 2012. This story keeps unfolding, but here's the bottom line: Change your Dropbox password now.
