Dropbox today announced a range of new productivity improvements designed to "simplify, unify, and secure" Dropbox workflows.
New to Dropbox's mobile apps, including Dropbox for iOS, is a built-in document scanner that uses an iPhone or iPad's camera to capture photos of whiteboards, notes, receipts, sketches, and more, converting them into documents that can be stored in Dropbox.
Like many iOS-based scanning apps, Dropbox's scanning tool will automatically detect the outline of the item being scanned and it offers editing tools for straightening, adjusting contrast, adding additional pages, and converting to black and white. Dropbox for Business users have additional scanning features at their disposal, including optical character recognition to convert scans into searchable text.
Improved Microsoft Office integration allows iOS users to create a Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel file by clicking a new plus button, simplifying the process of working on documents while on the go. Camera uploads are also being tweaked and going forward, Dropbox Basic users who want to continue to use the feature will need to install the Dropbox desktop app for management purposes.
On the desktop, there are new options to right click on a file or folder in the Mac Finder to share files from the desktop, and there are options for adding comments to a specific part of a file. Version history keeps multiple versions of a file in case a mistake is made, and there are better options for sharing with a select group of people.
Dropbox for the desktop is available from the Dropbox website at no cost. Dropbox for iOS can be downloaded from the App Store, also for free. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
Dropbox does have selective sync, but it does not appear as configurable as Sugarsync.
1) as soon as you add something, it automatically syncs to all Dropbox devices. Yes, there's selective sync, but it auto syncs new stuff added without any prompting. Annoying as hell.
2) Slow as molasses to download and upload. Three weeks to upload 700GBs worth of videos, from a gigabit Internet connection. It wouldn't upload beyond 3MB/s, through either the browser or application. It seemingly won't download beyond 5MB/s either. Speedtest shows upload/download speeds at 950Mb/s, for goodness' sake. I might as well make my own FTP server if I want to share anything (which is what I'm in the process of doing).
3) Unreliable downloads. I had a load of large (3.5GB+) applications on the cloud, in zip format. 50% of the time, it'll download fully (or seemingly fully) on a clients' machine, but the zip would be corrupted. Won't open. Or missing cabinet files. The file itself is fine. Happens too much to be a coincidence.
Good riddance, I say. Spent way too long wrestling with something that was a hindrance, hoping it would stop being a thorn in my rear. I'd be better off, and it would be quicker, spending £7 per month copying stuff to spare hard drives and couriering them out — which I actually had to do on one occasion.