After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.
I think the point is that it's not a printed medium. You can do anything you want with paper... It doesn't give restrictions to what you want to do. You can doodle, make a mind map, sketch an amazingly detailed human eye, or actually take notes and brainstorm in your meeting. Paper is flexible. Software is not. They think they've made a good attempt with "Paper" at providing that flexibility online.
Chrome, the browser, was born with the idea of reducing the amount of "chrome" (frames, controls and other UI elements) in the app. I guess developers like to have fun when naming their projects.
It was, more specifically, the online equivalent of a face book [0]. Which implies an answer to why name a product after printed media when it is not for print -- because it serves as an online equivalent or replacement.
However, a face book is a highly specific thing, where as 'paper' is about as generic as you can get - even wasps make it. Can I mop up a spill with dropbox paper? Make a hat out of it? Cut out a coupon? Make a saw[1] out of it?
Not to mention that it's far from the first product named 'paper' in our tech bubble.
> It's Google docs but instead of being aimed at producing documents for prints, it is aimed at producing document for online consumption (multimedia)
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.
Seriously. I landed on the page, watched the intro, and the little animated wizard created a rainbow. I actually sat there waiting for the damn wizard to deliver me an "aha" moment, but he just kept creating rainbows. Hah! I scrolled down and still don't get it. I actually like the wizard, but @#$%^... why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does.
> why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does.
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]?
I'm not sure if it's really still alive, but it actually got opened up, not just killed: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ - rare for a Google product that gets the axe.
Google Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs.
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.
The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.
>The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave.
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).
I used Wave extensively with an international team for project management and we found it extremely useful. The main problem was i) Yes, you had to get around a new way of working that merbed previously seperate paradigms - ii) (the killer) performance in the browser was completely horrendous.
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.
The problem is they are trying to use a name which has a widely understood meaning - Paper - and then attempting to redefine it but doing so by using it in sentences where the common meaning almost makes sense, leaving you in a state of partial confusion.
The use-cases that I see between something like Trello and Paper seem quite different. I'm using Paper so far to create an itinerary for an upcoming trip. It seems to be working quite well thus far. Displays on mobile nicely. Image layouts seem to be a bit clunky, but, to their credit doing it nicely is no easy task.
Initially when Paper was launched I tried and left the product quickly. I was using Quip a lot for my work as it's more developer friendly and easy to manage.
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.
I've been using it since October, and I agree with all your points.
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).
Ditto, I was lucky enough to try out the beta a year ago, and since then, I've been using it more and more compared to Docs or even text files (for event planning, side projects, server docs, etc).
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 only catch with markdown is about creating tables Dropbox paper has nailed it pretty well.
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.
Quip is a great product. I don't use it these days. I like everything about Quip except it's unconventional formatting shortcuts. I have tried various markdown based tools both mobile and web and finally I found Paper is appealing and strikes a balance between visual appeal, share and collaboration. Paper also syncs very small chunks of text (sentence level?) and it reduce conflicts a lot. Though I have used multiple tools for collaboration, the current version of Paper and Google Docs tops the list with my team.
Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures?
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...
Mailbox was an acquisition. Carousel was launched by Dropbox, but it came out of their acquisition of Snapjoy.
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.
Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx.
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.
One of the problems is that people want different things from a "simple document format".
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.
I'm pretty happy with pandoc markdown, compiled to PDF or HTML using LaTeX or CSS for styling, which achieves both of those design goals. But I also want to compose my first draft in a WYSIWYG editor and send it to non-technical users for editing (with tracked changes), so I do almost all of my writing in Word. It's the user interface, not the file format, that I find limiting.
I've been using Paper since October, and thus far it's been my favorite Markdown Editor. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of accepting inline markdown and then just getting out of the way.
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 been playing with passing markdown+css file+image tree to: pandoc {options} -H file.css --self-contained. It base64 encodes the images directly into the HTML5. The css in file.css is wrapped in <style></style> and is inlined in the header. The result is a fat HTML file with all the basic bits to make an article included. Exact line: pandoc --standalone --toc -V "toctitle:'Title'" --self-contained --to html5 -H article.css -o file.html file.markdown. Image links in code: \ <-- escaped space to force inline image.
For the longest time (5 or 6 years, way longer than Electron) I have been puzzled as to why there didn't exist a document format for offline websites/apps, that are basically a zip file of HTML+CSS+images+javascript.
That way you could build simple, easily distributable multimedia documents and web apps.
I haven't used it in a while, but most browsers allow you to go File->Save, and it'll save everything in a contained folder structure that should be easily zippable. Including all linked images/CSS/JS, with their references fixed for local-consumption.
That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.
This is close, but I'm thinking cut out the web tools part. Do we really have to depend on HTML and CSS (or other XML based format which needs a web browser to view) to make and edit a simple word document? I cringe thinking of the bloat that is introduced when using CSS and javascript to view text+pictures.
Thanks for the reply. I could really see making great looking documents with this. Although the problem is we're using all these cli tools (I love them too) to edit them.
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.
I hear you on needing piles of CLI packages. Regarding the web browser, the pandoc HTML seems pretty basic, so even the lightweight GUI browsers will probably handle it correctly. Also, if you include the correct bits in each image link in the markdown, I believe the resulting HTML5 will render with your included image descriptions in a text-only browser.
Here[1] is the HTML 5 standard. It includes a lot of things that a word file would never need. You're correct about not needing a lot of the things that say a browser like chrome has. Can we still not achieve the same thing with something simpler?
Only export though? I can't just edit the files in place with emacs, which is my preferred way to edit anything? I don't mind if all the collaboration stuff was only visible with whatever dropbox editing UI, I'd just like the freedom to edit with whatever tool I wish to use.
I use AsciiDoc for my more complicated documents. It's a lot like Markdown, but with more options when I need them to do specific things with formatting my documents.
Docx is basically a zipped container for XML + embedded images. What if there was a .mz (zipped markdown) format that markdown editors would treat as a single file for the document + embedded materials?
It's a very nice service, I've started to use it for personal notes instead of Onenote, but I have the feeling that MS will stay behind Onenote way after Dropbox has shut down Paper.
I'll throw Notion (https://notion.so/) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this.
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.
I've looked at Notion a few times, and it looks really impressive. It also looks really overwhelming – almost too many features/capabilities, so it's hard to know how it would fit into what I currently do, or what tools I should replace with it.
But maybe that means I'm not the right customer for it :)
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.
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.)
Looking at the landing page, I have built some hypothetical mental model on how to use the app and its feature, but it's mostly guessing - it would be awesome if they put up a video showcasing real-world usage and features.
"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.
I'll try to give a bit of an overview to help answer the first three questions.
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.
Notion looks really good, I am going to give it a go. What I like especially is that for a small 3 person team, just starting, it's price friendly. This in contrary to many other similar apps.
I just tried this in the browser and I can't get autofocus to work (Firefox 51 on Linux). Every time I hit enter for a new paragraph I need to click on it to be able to type again. Needless to say, a very dissatisfying experience. Though I can imagine it being nice if the auto-focus actually worked.
I sent them a bug report, we'll see if they fix it.
I second the recommendation for Notion - such a beautiful and fast interface. It is lacking some Trello features needed in my workplace, but it's really great for personal note-taking.
I'm using Dropbox Paper since quite a while and I love it. For PCs it is completely browser based and therefore works nicely on every platform - no native apps needed. It has mobile apps. I cancelled my Evernote subscription and account on the spot.
The only real downside at the moment from my point of view is that it does not yet have an offline mode.
It's not terrible. Personally, since I write in Markdown, it's an excellent tool for my niche documents. It doesn't integrate with Jekyll, but it's close enough. Simplenote is another decent app that happens to have Markdown support, but the implementation isn't very good. No image previews, no tables, and on occasion it will outright mess up the formatting in `code blocks`.
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].
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.
IMO all the current MD editors/previewers stink for some reason. I spent 10 min throwing together http://mrkdwn.pro - you can feed it any direct MD file URL and it will render it in Github flavored markdown. You can also directly go to a file like so:
Between Evernote, Office360 and Google Drive/Docs, etc. I'm of the opinion this was wasted time and money; and that it will not be a revenue or user growth driver for Dropbox. There are gaps in sharing and collaboration where paid demand exists. They include: end-to-end persistent encrypted sharing; File authentication; handwriting recognition/search; rule and ML based box culling; content-aware rules; mesh-network sharing; blockchain integration; content analysis for sourcing/data-viz; and so much more. I sense a lack of imagination at Dropbox.
I'm sorry but that first video is hilarious. That's the stuff Silicon Valley HBO makes fun of. I'm all for people working together to make the world a better place but I was in tears of laughter at that. I was looking for a (Made by HBO) disclaimer somewhere.
The product itself looks great. But paying some marketing firm to dress up Instagram models in outfits designed to evoke the feeling of a greek village seems like a questionable use of money.
> Sorry, there’s an issue connecting to the network. Once it reconnects, you’ll be able to edit your 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?
I used this quite a lot over the past 6 months, for personal note taking (didn't use any of the team/collaboration features or whatever)
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)
I can't believe they spent 3 years on this, I can do all this and more with Quip as a super performant native Mobile and native Desktop. The killing feature of Quip is it's ability to Mix, in a single document, an spreadsheet(most of what you'd use in Excel), formatted source code, images, todo-list, mentions & collaboration, version control and rich formatting. The desktop app is a mix of web and native, but is not a memory hog like a CEF app, it's pretty slick.
Yeah, sorry my bad, the table functionality is not nearly a replacement for spreadsheets, we have been using Numbers / Excel / Google Sheets and embedded those to the document if we have needed more robust data tables.
I can smell a favored executive's pet project stink from all the way over here. And I'm not even pooh-poohing Dropbox - I love them and use them religiously.
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).
I've been using the beta for quite a while. I haven't used it extensively, but I will probably use it more once it takes off. Early on in the beta process I requested Mathjax support. They added it, and now all you have to do to insert an equation is type a double dollar sign (ie, $$). That's sort of a killer feature, because most of my communications will involve equations at some point.
I used the Office collaboration features last with Office 2013 on Windows, and they were quite primitive. Basically, the document is synced with OneDrive.
The online version of Office has realtime collaboration AFAIK.
Possibly reposted in response to the recent release of Box Notes[1]?
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.
Honestly I don't see where all the sci-fi analogies and Wave comparisons are coming from. I've been using Paper in beta for several months now, and it is nothing more then a slick, streamlined version of the Etherpad , which arguably was a slick and streamlined version of Wave.
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.
Finally, they released google docs. I jest, buy I am going to give them (Dropbox) another shot. Google docs is very frustrating. From dumping me into an unorganized pile of text w/o folders to just enough features to make it complicated to do basic stuff but bot enough to do advanced...or even normal stuff.
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.
On the subject of annoyances with this page, I hate that everything is spaced out so much. So little information spread over a huge scrolling area. I thought this fad was dying out, but apparently not. So unnecessary and looks awful on a large monitor.
In case you're looking for a more wiki-like experience that supports internal links, markdown, and real-time editing check out https://www.nuclino.com (I'm a Co-Founder)
I haven't tried it, but I get that familiar feeling: you are stepping outside of your core business in a way that will be easily shut down if not making targets. See Carousel in Dropbox's case (nice product, very few complaints, presumably little to zero profit) but companies tend to treat these as moonshots instead of new businesses - it has to be a roaring success to last.
All these lovely services in the comments that I would love to use at work, but I can't because, I'm in the UK, working with somewhat sensitive personal data and there is no way we can commit that stuff to a data centre in the U.S somewhere these days. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than letting people self-host.
Second this. All these fancy services are neat but hosting private data in the US is seen in Europe as a major security risk, when it's not a complete no-no. Would be cool to know about self-hosted options.
Dropbox Paper is fantastic. You can write Markdown, or use GUI menus. Inline code and code blocks are great, just like normal Markdown. Great for meetings notes, design docs, anything you want to share and collaborate on. So much nicer to write in than Google Docs. It is designed for digital, not as an MS Word clone.
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.
I'm impressed how the landing page is completely localized in Russian. Even the screenshots. You can switch the language in the selector at the bottom with like 20 different languages. Pretty cool for a small(?) company like Dropbox.
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?
Actually, I was thinking of Quip when I wrote that. Quip locks the entire paragraph that is being changed, so others cannot work on the same paragraph. This is less than ideal. I actually do think Dropbox Paper is pretty good for collab, so that wasn't initially fair. My favorite feature is seeing who contributed to which line of the document.
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."
Regarding some of the sentiments in this thread... I have to agree...
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.
Does anyone know if they finally changed it with the official release so that when you make a document it actually stores a markdown file or html file somewhere in your actual dropbox? I absolutely hate how the current beta has it so it's disconnected. I want to be able to write stuff in paper but have access to the originals via sync so I can update them locally in maybe something like Sublime and just have it auto update in Paper itself.
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.
Very thoughtfully designed. I liked it better than Quip. But all our docs are in Google Docs, which sometimes includes spreadsheets, which doesn't appear supported. The very nice UX around collaboration isn't enough to justify the migration pain of moving hundreds of Google Docs and losing some of our gdoc non-text docs.
The iOS app is a complete mess. I can't delete notes, I can't access Archives, I can't rename folders nor delete them. I can't move notes between folders.
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.
At Monzo where I work, we use Dropbox Paper quite extensively for internal RFC's in the engineering team. We'd probably prefer to use a Google product since the rest of the company uses Drive so heavily, but Docs is simply atrocious when you need to insert some code.
What about that office suite that does the same and much more, in a much prettier way, which even includes full-featured embedded spreadsheets in the documents?
I have almost this idea too with some interesting twists; it's probably going to be hard to complete with Dropbox though as a one man team. At least this is only a component of what I plan to build and probably the least important bit...
Man wtf Dropbox. There are literally thousands of smaller updates and increments you can be making to the product. This type of stuff doesn't have a market! Fire your design team and start over. It will keep not working!
I really like the idea but I just tried the Android app and is super buggy. Text formatting doesn't work, it seems impossible to delete docs... And that's just what I found in 5 minutes of use
After looking this over again, it kind of seems like a blogging platform. I'm going to DL it later, but looks like it could be a sneaky way for them to enter the content publishing space.
"However you think — in words, code, pictures or motion — Paper brings it all together in one place." Can you really communication in "motion" on this site?
Just find it utterly surprising anyone is willing to invest time bringing Dropbox products (other than their core storage product) into their workflow considering their track record of killing off even popular products.
We are using it all day every day at our offices, it's a superb shared Notepad that combines speed, simplicity, robust media features (such as embed, code blocks...), notification system, Dropbox integration and share-ability into a tight little package. Haven't looked back to Google Docs ever since.
