Dropbox Paper
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
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.
Not to mention that it's far from the first product named 'paper' in our tech bubble.
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.
I use Paper more and more these days with my team though we are into Google for Work. Google Docs is a tough cookie and an office replica.
Those who are in to markdown, they would hardly go back to anything else for formatting. The only catch with markdown is about creating tables Dropbox paper has nailed it pretty well.
The product is more pleasing for eyes with better typography, cleaner design and user experience. There's no friction to write. The people who collaborates are more productive easily review and feedback. Also it's more developer friendly with quick emojis with ":" shortcut.
Finally nothing beats the simplicity of Dropbox Sharing.
The product has lot more opportunities to grow. Expecting more integrations in the coming days.
The markdown integration, especially for inlining code, is awesome and what Docs should have been. Being able to quickly make a checklist has also change my note taking behavior and I almost never use straight up text files or specific list apps anymore.
That said, they recently changed their UI to hide the starred docs from the side bar which really makes them harder to find, and I actually find the inline dropbox file links/tables fidgety. But all in all, it's pretty awesome at reducing the friction between mind to note.
The biggest draw for me has been how quickly I can throw together a relatively well formatted doc without thinking much about it. Using inline markdown for headers and basic text formatting is fantastic, and I agree that the table implementation is the best I've used with any markdown-based tool.
I really appreciate the inline google maps, which has been great for planning trips. One welcome addition would be the ability to include a single map with multiple "pins", as having multiple maps on a single page can get pretty untenable as a doc grows. I've tried using links from custom google "My Maps", but that doesn't work (yet?).
I'd love to be able to add other extensions, like yelp review lookups or gist lookups. Maybe not as embeds but as "paste lookups", where pasting a url would create a pre-formatted paragraph or table in the doc (just like how pasting a map url embeds the map).
Agreed. Writing Markdown in anything else, I often open up Numbers and generate my spreadsheet there with formulas, etc, then export to CSV, then use a CSV to Markdown table converter that fully pads each column to be the same width. Probably an opportunity to optimize this further, but it takes < 1 minute and works better for me than writing Markdown tables of any complexity by hand.
> The product is more pleasing for eyes with better typography, cleaner design and user experience.
My favorite feature is being able to highlight text and Cmd-V to insert a link automatically.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I've used Paper a number of times, starting from long before Notion was a thing, having been a happy Etherpad and Hackpad user in the past. Somehow Paper managed to inspire less in my collaborators than either the latter services (where perhaps plain text was the factor) or than Notion (the reaction of almost everyone I've shown it to has been amazement and excitement).
Since this is the second time I'm mentioning Notion here, I'll reiterate that I'm not affiliated - just a happy customer.
But maybe that means I'm not the right customer for it :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027
A few months later, I'm still using it in place of most other tools that I had been using, with the exception that for lack of an API or good way of pulling the very rich content out, I still use Google Keep for very plain text notes.
"Task Board, Design Specs, Knowledge Base, Coding Docs, Team Handbook, Roadmap" - are these possible use-cases of the system? Or are they disparate document types? You create a document and pick one of these types which determines its features and layout?
"lets you nest pages inside each other" - does this mean hyperlinking?
"No more markup" - so WYSIWYG, just like Google Docs, Quip, MS Office, etc?
"Love using Trello" - I don't know what Trello is.
There's Slack notifications, but can you @tag people?
I started explaining all of these in depth, but aspects of it would take an order of magnitude more text to explain than they would to simply experience first-hand - I'd encourage you to instead simply try out the first page of the demo experience, which I think would be dramatically more information-packed.
In Notion, all your documents are basically a big nested hierarchy of pages. Pages (generally) exist within another page, rather than simply being linked to (though you can link to pages in a different part of the hierarchy through either their URLs or by aliasing the page, letting a document live in more than one part of the tree at once). By nesting the pages, you get a nice table of contents in the sidebar.
Pages are composed of "blocks". These are just page elements, and most of these are the kinds of things you'd expect to see in a document (paragraphs, images, sections, bullet lists, etc.). There are some special ones, like TeX equations, inline discussion forums, and other things, but these are entirely optional.
Unlike a document in Word/Google Docs, blocks are more of a real entity that you'd interact with. For example, you can select a whole block (and any children) at once, drag-and-drop them elsewhere in the document (even to the left or right of other blocks, creating columns), link to them, and even transform them into other types of blocks (like bullet lists to numbered lists).
Pages themselves are actually a kind of block, which is neat. Let's say you have a giant page full of content, and you want to split out some of the sections in the page and put them in their own page. Simply click the block options for that section and choose "Turn Into -> Page", and now it's a new page linked where the section used to be, at the right place in the hierarchy.
Task Boards, Design Specs, etc. are really just templates. They're nothing special. You can make them by hand if you want to, or change them however you want. They're really just there to help you get going if you have use of them. No different than templates in Work, Excel, etc.
As far as WYSIWYG goes, since you're dealing with these page elements (bullet points, section headers, etc.), it really is pretty much WYSIWYG. You can select text or a header or whatever and change the styling a bit (colors, sizes, fonts, all to a limited degree).
Along with that, though, there's a form of Markdown processing. These are really more like keyboard shortcuts, though. Type "# " to get a section. Enclose something in backticks to make it appear as code. "* " for a bullet list. Things like that. It's not a full Markdown engine, though. There are a few bugs with some of these shortcuts, but they mostly work.
Editing in Notion is definitely a bit different, because you're kinda forced to think about blocks and hierarchy a bit more, but they've improved much of this over the past couple of months to make it more natural to work with. They've been hard at work with improvements, from the looks of it, so I'm expecting a lot of this to really improve more going forward.
I sent them a bug report, we'll see if they fix it.
We started off with Hackpad and used that for years, and tried moving to Dropbox Paper when Hackpad was end-of-lifed. While a good product, it wasn't really good enough for what we needed. We were using Hackpad like a wiki, and Paper just wasn't (at the time, at least) built to really be effective for public content like that.
We moved to Notion, and while it's certainly more complex in what it can do, it's met our needs far better than Paper and even Hackpad have. Notion continues to improve pretty much constantly (I get excited when I get the blue banner at the top of the UI saying there are new updates), and the people we've interacted with there have been fantastic.
It's not perfect, but they've been hammering out the major bugs and shortcomings we hit when we first started, and recently pushed a big update that improved how free/paid teams work, added namespaces for pages, and a handful of other improvements here and there.
We have a lot of content in Notion now, and it's been pretty easy to keep that updated and to jump around. (The native Mac app has helped a lot with that as well.)
(Also not in any way affiliated. Just another happy customer.)
The only real downside at the moment from my point of view is that it does not yet have an offline mode.
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.
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://www.engadget.com/2016/06/22/dropbox-ios-app-scanning...
I believe it was previously discussed on HN but I can't find the link anymore, anyway they go into detail on the implementation here:
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/08/fast-and-accurate-doc...
This kills it for me. What good is a note-taking application if taking the notes depends on having network connectivity, 100℅ of the time? (The message appeared while writing, not even when trying to save).
I though the whole point of Dropbox was having a local copy of the document, which was synchronized in the background? Why doesn't Paper work that way?
It's pretty nice, supports inline LaTeX, embedding youtube, spotify, images, tweets, PDFs, google docs and has a good markdown parser.
I've recently moved over to org-mode though, mainly because there are more features (although it doesn't support the rich media things like embedded videos etc, but has good enough solutions for images and LaYeX)
What I love about Paper (compared to Google Docs and similar tools) is it's simplicity. Formatting options are extremely limited, so all you have to do is just to type and it'll lay the document out for you.
This is actually the best feature, since you don't waste time adjusting tab stops and figuring out how to make bullet lists work (which was like 50% of my time when writing documents in regular editors).
Genuine question. I'm asking about Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
The online version of Office has realtime collaboration AFAIK.
It's like Google Docs if it was designed today instead of a decade ago.
My team uses it instead of Google Docs for Feature Specs, Meeting Notes, etc.
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.
It has all the features I used from GDocs, it is convenient and pleasant to look at. Long-form notes are very pleasant to write there. Note-taking aspect of this is definitely something they should explore more.
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...
For self-hosting try https://github.com/documize/community -- WYSIWYG or Markdown, integrate data from Trello, GitHub, or roll your own integration.
Still early days yet, but you should get a feel for docs/wiki/SaaS data embedding.
I like writing in Paper so much that I use it to write things I'm not going to share via Paper. I actual copy and paste out of Paper into email or Google Docs when I work for companies that don't use Paper. I'll write things like READMEs in Paper first, before moving them to a .md file.
The UX is so well thought out. For example, the link creation is so simple. You copy a URL, like from the URL bar, then highlight the text in Paper that you want to be a link, and Cmd+V. The highlighted text will now be hyperlink to the URL on the clipboard.
The mobile app is handy too.
https://github.com/ether/pad/tree/master/infrastructure/ace
(I used to work on Dropbox Paper)
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."
Here's an article from 2015: https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/15/dropbox-announces-paper-a-...
How exactly does this help me/large teams?
Their customer list, sure, has "cool names" -- but the workflow support this provides seems to focus on 19 year old college grads who were forced to do group projects and have only ever touched a macbook air.
"beautiful interface" -- do you know how many pitches (including multiple companies from the decades past) attempted to sell their idea on "clean UI" failed and failed and failed?
Look if this works for you - then use it - but a white dude and an asian chick sitting in a clean room with a mac thinking about their "marketing" is pretty boring.
So - what does this do? How about show me the problem the two in the landing are working on...
---
"Before - we were trying to get the reqs from the PM to the devs based on the input from the marketing research of what our customers were asking for WRT features... the pipeline was clogged and nobody was on the same page... emails, PPTs, MTGs etc - nothing worked... then we brought in this new tool - spent a month and a half selling it to the devs to get them to actually create a fucking account, and 18 months later - we are 3% more effective than we were before!" YAY!
Sorry - thats how I see tools like such, "Lets disrupt 40 years of DNA on a particular workflow that our experienced devs have been using by showing them a lot of minimalistic whitespace and hi-res stock photos!"
how about turn this into a slack hook and let the devs do their thing and be up-front that this is for marketing and PMs and the devs should never see it. It should create requests of (producer of widget) via whatever method that (producer of widget) is used to....
or... found your freaking startup from day-one on a freaking tool...
Finally, it would seem that things like this are relegated to very small teams - and you should be wary of attempting to get other groups in your co to drink your cool UI kool-aid.
/cynicism...
These and other features may require our systems to access, store and scan Your Stuff. You give us permission to do those things, and this permission extends to our affiliates and trusted third parties we work with.
So, in order to work on collaborative documents, I give Dropbox, Dropbox affiliates and trusted third parties access? Who are these people?
Others working for Dropbox. Dropbox uses certain trusted third parties (for example providers of customer support and IT services) to help us provide, improve, protect and promote our Services. These third parties will access your information only to perform tasks on our behalf ... https://www.dropbox.com/terms
Maybe not so great for business data privacy compliance then?
I know it's not just Dropbox, but the idea that I'm creating business content in some pseudo-document format that an unspecified number of people, including outsourced IT, have access to is unsettling.
It's a gold mine for Dropbox of course. They control the document format, making it really easy to data mine. They know exactly what everyone is working on. Your team spends hours planning bigger, brighter ideas, and someone is watching.
And they hold us hostage forever. Export is .docx only and the export formatting is atrocious, non usable.
What ever happened to encryption for cloud-based services? We're giving all our data away.
--
Now, with all that said, Dropbox Paper does solve a number of problems businesses face. The bare bones editor, overall simplicity, and elimination of the traditional file format makes it really easy to use, especially when collaborating with folks that may not create documents every day.
Paper docs are giving Basecamp, non-developer Confluence Pages (JIRA) and web hosting at our office a run for the money. Because it doesn't feel bloated.
Plus, there's too many options for these types of business productivity tools at the moment. Simpler is better in this regard, as navigating all of the options, and training people, is a project nobody really wants to commit to. At least not at our office.
That makes Dropbox Paper a good fit for something.
You can also export as MarkDown.
This leads me to believe the app was rushed but apparently there's a version history I the App Store. I left as much feedback as I could through the app but man, yikes.
I mean Quip: https://quip.com/
On a related note, someone should make Sketch files collaborative in real time =D
sync files - Google Drive
sync photos - Google Photos
sync docs that are like websites and also track progress and chat and tons of other features you don't really need but will be shut down in a year!