Michal Marek Dropbox presented a number of new features at its conference yesterday, and some of them will surely please iOS and OS X users as well. Mailbox is also about to debut on Android. The second important innovation is a completely new application called Carousel, which will take care of backing up your photos on the iPhone.
Mailbox
Mailbox for Mac will offer a classic layout in three columns and will harmonize with its colleague on iOS with a nice minimalist interface. According to the server TechCrunch users will be able to control the app using gestures on their trackpad. Functionally, Mailbox on Mac should practically copy its iOS version and thus offer the user the same experience and way of working on all three platforms – iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Even the successful and well-established iOS version will receive the update. It will get a new "auto swipe" function, thanks to which it will be possible to teach the application automatic operations with individual emails. The messages you have selected will be able to be deleted or archived immediately. The update will thus bring one of the biggest changes to the application since its purchase by Dropbox. This successful company bought the application last year and, according to available information, paid something between 50 and 100 million dollars for it.
Users can now sign up for beta testing of Mailbox for Mac by doing so at Mailbox website. It is not yet clear when the final version will arrive in the Mac App Store, and no more specific information is known about the arrival of the update on iOS.
Carousel
Carousel is a completely new application for iPhone created under the baton of Dropbox. This is an application that elegantly takes care of backing up all your photos taken with your phone and sorting them in an effective way. The method of sorting photos is similar to the built-in iOS application, and the images are thus divided into events by date and location. In addition, there is a timeline on the bottom of the display, thanks to which you can elegantly scroll through the photos.
[vimeo id=”91475918″ width=”620″ height=”350″]
Snapshots are automatically saved to your Dropbox, in the Camera Uploads folder by default. The possibility of sharing is also elaborated. You can share your photos with anyone, and they don't even have to have Dropbox. Just enter his phone number or e-mail. If the recipient also has the Carousel app installed (which you can tell when sending photos by the icon next to the name in the list of recipients), sharing is even more elegant and you can send them photos directly in the app. In addition, the application can be used to send classic text messages and to comment on the sent images.
Carousel supports push notifications, so you'll always know what's happening in the app. The application has a pleasant and modern user interface and also impresses with control using elegant gestures. It is very easy to share individual photos or entire albums (swipe up for individual photos), but also hide them if you don't want to see them in the library (swipe down).
You can download the app for free from the App Store. Those who already used the automatic photo backup feature inside Dropbox will certainly welcome the standalone Carousel app.
[app url=”https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/carousel-by-dropbox/id825931374?mt=8″]
That's nice, but then Dropbox would also have to come up with some more interesting pricing or more space for free. Today, Flickr offers 1 TB of free photo space. If someone needs such a space for data, such services already exist, for example, I also have 1 TB on mail.ru and a similar application for iOS like Dropbox. The offer for 10 TB for free is also known, but it is from the Chinese, full of unreadable characters for us and apparently not very sophisticated yet.
Doesn't it offer me almost the same photostream?? and its sharing? It makes sense to me, maybe multi-platform apple to android .. But for people who use photostream and the family use apple or __?? What do you think ?
I also think about the added value for iOS users. Probably only multi-platform. Then the question is whether I want to have all the photos from the iPhone on two services. I have enough work with sorting even in one.
I honestly think the Mailbox app for iPad is useless right now. You can't put anything else in it except iCloud and Gmail, you can't add pop or imap and smtp of other services. For those who have email on a list, corporate Office365 email, domain email and the like, Mailbox is useless. I hope they work on it a bit for the Mac, although Airmail is irreplaceable for me at the moment.