Dropbox Wants To Rid You of Your Hard Drive with the Dropbox Platform
For as wonderfully convenient as a cloud storage and syncing solution like Dropbox is, it’s still just essentially a place to park your files so that you can access them when you need them; it doesn’t replace your hard drive (on your desktop or mobile device), which contains all your settings and things like contacts and to do lists--basically, all your structured data.
At its first ever developers conference today, Dropbox announced the Datastore API, which handles all of that structured data across multiple devices and operating systems. Dropbox likens it to a “simple embedded database” whose changes are automatically synced; further, the API resolves any conflicts if a user makes changes to a datastore on multiple devices.
The Datastore API is designed to work hand-in-hand with the existing Sync and Core APIs.
Dropbox also unveiled new Drop-ins, the Chooser and the Saver. The Chooser lets devs insert a couple of lines of code and subsequently allow users of their app to access their Dropbox files via a clean Dropbox UI, while the Saver, when implemented, makes it simple to for users to save a file directly to Dropbox from the web or mobile web.
Dropbox Platform Saver Drop-in
These updates perhaps aren’t revolutionary, but they’re certainly intriguing, and they demonstrate how Dropbox is gradually inserting itself more and more into people’s daily computing lives. However, some will no doubt feel nervous about allowing a cloud storage and syncing company of any kind handle so much of their data, which is a valid concern.
At its first ever developers conference today, Dropbox announced the Datastore API, which handles all of that structured data across multiple devices and operating systems. Dropbox likens it to a “simple embedded database” whose changes are automatically synced; further, the API resolves any conflicts if a user makes changes to a datastore on multiple devices.
The Datastore API is designed to work hand-in-hand with the existing Sync and Core APIs.
Dropbox also unveiled new Drop-ins, the Chooser and the Saver. The Chooser lets devs insert a couple of lines of code and subsequently allow users of their app to access their Dropbox files via a clean Dropbox UI, while the Saver, when implemented, makes it simple to for users to save a file directly to Dropbox from the web or mobile web.
Dropbox Platform Saver Drop-in
These updates perhaps aren’t revolutionary, but they’re certainly intriguing, and they demonstrate how Dropbox is gradually inserting itself more and more into people’s daily computing lives. However, some will no doubt feel nervous about allowing a cloud storage and syncing company of any kind handle so much of their data, which is a valid concern.
