Posted by chris on Dec 4, 2008

Great Moments by Design - Dropbox Part II

File sharing and revision history are a plus.

One thing I really enjoy about a good piece of software is this—using it is like a relationship. There are those features/characteristics that first drew you to every particular application you use—the obvious, the beautiful, the items that are visible on the surface. But over time, as you use the application regularly, you get to know a little more. Some qualities are good and some are bad. Just like a relationship1.

And sometimes you find features in the product you thought you knew so well that make you sit up and say, “What just happened?” It’s those moments that bring me a lot of enjoyment and prompted me to start this regular feature of covering well implemented ideas and small design touches in my favorite applications.

This past week brought another of those moments. Twice. In this same application.

Like Rands, I’ve really come to appreciate the design of Dropbox. I’ve posted about this app before, but I initially had only been using it for remote storage of a few items to access from multiple computers.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve started doing some collaboration work on Fusion and we use Dropbox for file sharing. This is the first cool item that got my attention. The integration with Dropbox is so tight.

The other person shared out one of their folders and gave me permission. I assumed that meant I would connect to their folder via a web browser. I was wrong. That folder simply appeared in my Dropbox folder on my local machine … just as if it was one of my own folders like all the rest that are in there.

In addition, anytime either of us update a file in that folder, the other person gets a notification via Growl that an update has been made. There are other nice tools out there for collaborative work, but nothing that I’ve seen integrates so nicely with the OS like Dropbox.

Secondly, the other feature that grabbed my attention was the revision history for every file in your Dropbox folder. I needed to look back at the contents of a file to see where a typo had been made and Dropbox made that possible. You can view the revision history of any file via your Dropbox web interface, but additionally, this functionality is available in the OS as well. Simply right click on any file to bring up the Contextual menu and there is a Dropbox item in the list. From there you can access the revision history2.

So even though I’ve featured this app as a Great Moment by Design in the past, I feel it warrants another mention. The developers have done such a great job at getting syncing right, where it’s so easy to go wrong. Add in strong file sharing capabilities and historical archiving and you’ve got a really great product.

  1. Of course, in this scenario, if the bad qualities irk you enough, you get to switch to another application with little cost. Relationships, not so. [↩]
  2. This is where your web browser comes in—I assume the revision history is looking at copies of the files on the Dropbox servers, and so displays the copies in a web browser window. [↩]