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Comment by droppedTheBox | Hacker News Reader

Don't understand. What's wrong with just pasting a screenshot or recording into Slack or your PM tool of choice?

Adding Dropbox is just adding another layer of auth, sharing permissions, storage quotas, etc.... ugh

It should be seamless. You just record a video and it is instantly shareable. Could be useful for reporting UI bugs. You can also use the mic to describe the problem.

It's the opposite of seamless, no? Instead of pasting the video (which macOS and Windows can both natively record) into your bug tracker or Slack, you have to first upload it to Dropbox Capture, share the link to that, worry about permissions and storage, etc... it adds more friction than it removes

It doesn't work like that. The moment you end the capture, the video is automatically uploaded, the link is provided and you just send it over slack or paste to jira or whatever.

You're missing the point. That's almost the same as the OS doing it natively and pasting into Slack. Except it adds one more step than before, along with permissions & pricing headaches. What's the advantage?

Instead of the native: Screenshot/recording --> clipboard --> Slack

Now you have Screenshot/recording --> clipboard --> Dropbox capture + permissions/billing --> Slack

Why would Dropbox insert itself into a process that works fine without it and adds no benefit?

It's like instead of copying & pasting a paragraph of text into Slack, you use an extension that makes a GDoc of it and then links to that. But why?

> Screenshot/recording --> clipboard --> Dropbox capture + permissions/billing --> Slack

Could you list some examples of software that require you to go through permissions or billing for every usage? Otherwise, this is a made-up concern.

GDocs, for one. Every time you share a link, some people can see it and some can't, and newcomers and agencies keep having to ask for permissions...

Sure, it's fixable, but again why introduce the complexity when Slack and Jira ALREADY LET YOU PASTE IN RICH MEDIA and handle permissions and sharing internally?

What does Dropbox Capture add that makes it worth the extra hoops? The markup? The embedded avatar? I just fail to see the worth of this product...

> GDocs, for one. Every time you share a link

I’ve never heard anyone complain about granular permissions for potentially sensitive documents. However, your “issue” is entirely made-up, because you can easily generate an “Everyone” link in gDocs.

> Slack and Jira ALREADY LET YOU PASTE IN RICH MEDIA and handle permissions and sharing internally

Slack & Jira are for different use cases/audiences, and handle significantly less rich media than gDocs can. However, if your company is shoehorning gDocs into situations where you could type into these other tools, that’s a social problem, not a technical one.

> What does Dropbox Capture add that makes it worth the extra hoops?

Given their positioning and competition, I’m going to assume there are very few “hoops” in their UX.

> I just fail to see the worth of this product...

Honestly, from reading the rest of your rant and misplaced anger, I don’t think you’d be able to clearly see product value anyways.

Also, it is very valuable to persist all these videos/screenshots in the cloud. You can re-use them later and maybe it will help you debug. It is neat to auto-organize these files.

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