hi all,
I think we're overdue for an update on what's new and cooking at dropbox :-). unfortunately, in the last feature update I was a bit over-optimistic about how quickly we'd get through some features. in the last few months we've been super busy scaling many elements of dropbox: scaling client performance on large file sets, scaling infrastructure to make sure it's bulletproof and fast (we're growing at over 25% month over month(!)), scaling support, and scaling the teams working on various elements of dropbox and getting new dropboxers up to speed on all the interworkings.
after several months of bug and stability fixes, we're very excited about finally releasing the latest stable build. we're quite happy with the stability of the build, which means we'll be finally be spending more time on developing new functionality. in hopes of making more realistic predictions of what's coming up and how long it'll take, I'm going to keep the list short and limit it to what we'll likely have available for you guys to play with in the next 2-3 months (more functionality may make it out, but I'm trying to be conservative this time :), so here goes!
on the client:
- new Nautilus package which doesn't auto-start for every user, features new icon overlays and finally, the Linux CLI (!)
- LAN P2P sync optimizations (i.e. dropboxes on the same network will exchange blocks locally instead of downloading from the server - we actually have this working at the office :-)
- selective sync (i.e. the ability to exclude paths from syncing to specific computers)
- significant performance improvements when moving around/manipulating large numbers of files (needed before we unveil the ability to sync any folder)
- significant memory improvements (both when idle and syncing)
- Snow Leopard support
on the web:
- much improved web-uploader
- better file browser (with multi select/more intuitive actions)
- improvements to the feed (potentially with 'undo' per feed item)
- new user guide (the client will likely download this by default)
on the mobile/API front:
- the iphone app
- non-iphone friendly mobile site
- alpha of the dropbox API
and finally, more plans! (no promises that there will be a < 50GB plan, but we are seriously considering it and working on figuring out/testing how viable smaller plans are).
we're of course working on (or planning on) many other improvements (better shared folder controls, better ways to publicly share sets of files, group accounts, support for more mobile platforms, etc. but I don't want to over-promise :-)
