Almost There

As you may or may not know we have been working on our ‘Multi’ feature and were in the home stretch. Not only will it include the coolness described earlier, it will show progress on each individual as it uploads. Just wanted to let everyone know where we’re at with this as well as to thank you for your patience.

In The Meantime…

…we’re going to launch our password recovery feature. Yeah yeah, I know this is a very simple feature, but we kept putting it off in order to work on our bigger features coming up. We’ve always hated the fact that we’ve had to send the password in email and finally I guess it just bugged us enough to make us fix the darn thing. Thanks for your patience

Multi

So we’re working on giving you guys the ability to select multiple files all in one shot before you upload. This way you won’t have to hit the ‘Browse’ button 13 times and select 1 file each time. It might not seem like the flashiest feature, but when you’re trying to upload the 13 mp3s on an album it saves a hell of a lot of aggrivation. Stay tuned…

New Stuff

Improved UI – We’ve made behaviors more consistent and standardized across browsers as well as cleaned up the interface as a whole.

Improved Performance – Though you may not notice these changes right away, we did a hell of a lot of tweaks on the back-end to improve stability and scalability overall.

Company Info Section – We’re real people, no really! We now provide more insight into who we are as a company and have even included some hawt pics!

Coming Soon:

Progress Bar – So you’ll know how much time is remaining before your uploads are complete.

Multi-Select (Upload/Download) - You’ll finally be able to upload a bunch of files at once, no more clicking the ‘Browse’ button 13 times. Phew.

Better Transparency

I’ve come to realize that the transparency into our company and who we are is a tad anemic. In our ‘Company Info’ section, it describes our philosophy briefly as well as mentions the names of the people on our team. We’ve received a lot of feedback from users wondering if we are a giant company or a couple of trolls in a leaky basement and so on. We’re somewhere between actually, but more on that later.

Our company is made up of great people and there’s no reason to keep them under wraps. Were also very aware of that fact that we don’t have the clout and brand recognition of a Google or Microsoft, therefore we need to do a better job at gaining your trust.

All that being said, we would really like to get your feedback as to what type of information you would like us to include in this section which would help us gain your trust and respect. We are planning on putting our pictures and a brief description of our job/expertize but I’m assuming that there is more stuff that you guys would like to know. Please feel free to leave a comment on this blog to do so, thanks.

Good Problem To Have (Sorta)

Since the launch of our Folders feature a few weeks ago, we’ve been experiencing sort of a mixed blessing. We’ve had a significant enough increase in visitors that it’s caused us to pull our email announcement. See, we’ve been flirting with memory leak issues (nothing serious) on our application server so the last thing we want is tens of thousands of users hitting the our site at once. Though I’ve read that ‘your web application isn’t successful unless you’re experiencing scaling problems’ it still sucks that we aren’t yet able to properly announce our new feature to our entire user base via a ‘New Features’ email. We should have the problem sorted out in a few days but still

When you do receive the ‘New Features’ email please forgive us for having folders as one of the line items even though it technically isn’t brand-spanking. Wait a second… if you go to the ‘New Releases’ section of BlockBuster you’ll probably still see Ocean’s 11. Hmmm, I don’t feel so bad now.

The Day Has Come

Ok, ok. I know, that sounds a little dramatic, but we’ve just launched the Folders feature and it’s kind of a big deal to us. Mainly because of the fact that it was such a challenge. Though it may seem like a simple little feature to you, it was actually very, very difficult to get all the the functions and behaviors just right. And since I personally am a perfectionist by my very nature, it made it that much more difficult.

Hope you guys like it. Please give us your feedback, we’re interested.

Folders Coming Soon

We finally gave in.

You see, I was very against folders at the beginning. One of the main reasons for this was because the singular goal of DropBoks as a service is to be the simplest and most intuitive option available, period. We are very cautious about adding new features. The main reason I decided to create DropBoks in the first place was because the options in the market had tons of features I didn’t need or want. So you can understand my reasoning.

But requests for folders (and sometimes tags) from our users just kept coming in; without letup. I kept trying to fight it, but the logic for adding the feature was very sound.

So we agreed as a team that folders would be a good feature and started the brainstorming process. The number one goal of this process was to add the capability to create/edit/move folders and so on, but not present the feature to users who weren’t looking for it. We never forget our users that only want the bare bones, so we didn’t want to screw them.

We believe that the end result will be a perfect solution for all of our users. Hang tight

≡≡≡Speed

We have greatly decreased download time. Yay!

Now, whenever you click a file to download, the browser download prompt comes up instantly. You may remember that it used to take quite a long time on larger files. Ok, lets be honest… it was dog slowwww. We’re very excited about this since many of you put very large files on our system.

Now you won’t have to wait.

Bugs!

The last few days have been eventful to say the least. On Sunday we experienced some unexpected downtime due to a bug on our host’s system. Then on Tuesday we a little more downtime (about half an hour) due to the same bug. Our hosting company has since fixed the issue for good. All is now iron-clad again.

We sincerely apologize to any of our users who did not have access to their files. We know what a pain that can be and we’re doing everything in our power to ensure this never, ever, ever happens again. Thank for your patience.