Paper - Dropbox's New Collaboration Notebook

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Half a year ago, Dropbox quietly announced a collaboration note with the uncomplicated name Notes, and at the same time launched a beta test by invitation. Today, this project has transformed into Dropbox Paper - a competitor to solutions from Google, Microsoft and to some extent Evernote. By combining the GTD tool and the simultaneous work of several users on one document, the new product claims to be the most significant innovation of the company for a long time.

is still closed to a wide range of users, but based on the first reviews, you can already get a clear idea of what the new product will offer. In Paper, you can work on the same document at the same time for several users - this will not surprise anyone, especially since at first the new product will be available only in the browser window. The interface is a realm of minimalism, replete with white, and, according to the first users, the experience is similar to the popular text editor iA Writer. And Dropbox also focuses on the fact that Paper is primarily about sharing ideas, so formatting has receded into the background.

This brings us to the first advantage of the new product - the convenience of importing any type of file. Whatever you store in Dropbox can be inserted into a document. Add a cloud-generated URL and Paper will create a beautiful preview. What's even more interesting, the new product works with links from Google Drive and Google Docs. This is the first time these services have been integrated with the Dropbox ecosystem.

In addition, photos can be freely dragged into the body of the document and create mini-galleries from two or three small images in a row. Would you like to add a YouTube video? No problem, the link will turn into a mini-player, and the video can be watched without leaving the note. The same goes for songs and entire playlists from SoundCloud and Spotify. Dropbox even picked up the wave of sticker popularity and gave chat users the ability to send stylized likes as endorsements.

Chatting, collaboration is another strong point of Paper. Here, the developers have implemented a mini-Asana with task lists, task delegation, and execution control. It sounds promising, and given its ease of use (the responsible person is noted with the familiar @), the new product can be the optimal tool for the work of small, undemanding teams. It can be development teams as well: Paper formats the code correctly, and there you can easily discuss the details of a particular method or class.

The last advantage in a row, but not in importance, is the organization of notes. For convenience, Paper has folders, favorites, search, and a chronologically sorted feed of edits across all shared documents.

The novelty seems to be one of the most thoughtful Dropbox products in a long time. The developers are betting on a minimum of unnecessary in the design and organization of notes and bring Paper to a market where analogues from Google, Microsoft and Evernote already exist. Will it be the next big thing for Dropbox, or will it fail to squeeze out its competitors and be left with nothing? Write your thoughts on this in the comments.