

Castle.so Upload and share your files, beautifully. - chrisledet
https://castle.so

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PedroCandeias
Looks pretty straightforward. But why use this over, for example, crate? Also,
how are you going to make revenue out of it? S3 does cost money.

#edit: Almost forgot. Well done on the UI front. Minor gripe: an actual button
to select the file to upload would be nice. Having to launch Finder and
browsing to the file I'm looking for, then dragging it back to the browser,
can take much longer than just clicking a button, browsing and clicking
"open".

~~~
chrisledet
Thanks for the feedback. We'll certainly add a classic upload page. Also, we
plan to have freemium model soon. We also have a Mac & Linux client in the
works - just need to find the time!

~~~
merlincorey
Alright but what if I'm on BSD and I have a keyboard driven window manager
without a mouse?

What I mean to say is, the class upload page is probably more important early
on than individual OS clients.

I really do like the design and concept, though.

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nodata
A Somalian domain means that I will never use this service: the country is not
politically stable enough. Sorry.

~~~
abailin
How does a country's political stability affect what domain names you will
use?

The nameservers for the .so domain are not physically located in Somalia:
<http://www.zonecut.net/dnsgeo/SO..html>

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bmj
Because the trustee of the domain (which one would assume would be an
organization within the country) has administrative rights for the domain. And
that trustee can decide to require local presence to use that TLD, which might
leave this particular service offline, at least for a time.

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recursive
It's so beautiful I can't figure our how to use it. I read the about section,
which seems to suggest that you should drag a file onto the browser, and then
something will happen. I dragged a text file onto the red circle, and it just
opened the file in the browser. No upload happened as far as I could tell. I'm
using Opera 11.52 and Win XP. Am I just missing the point?

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chrisledet
You need to drag the file onto the Castle which is the large gray area on the
bottom half of the screen.

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recursive
Incidentally, I found some text that says "Drag & drop your file onto the
Castle below.", but it's white on white, so I was only able to notice it by
selecting the text. If I had seen that text originally, it would have made the
page slightly less mysterious.

The color is coming from line 1244 of
[https://castle.so/assets/application-85b2387ecd44d11edb66f04...](https://castle.so/assets/application-85b2387ecd44d11edb66f044664cc6f4.css)

~~~
dangrossman
The text is supposed to be white; it's on a blue sky background.

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tripzilch
Any way to upload a file if your browser or OS doesn't support drag-n-drop?

Would've been nice if they told me that before I signed up. Well, you got my
email now, let me know when it becomes usable.

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terryjsmith
Definitely easy to use, but once I was on the preview page for my image, I
didn't see an easy link to share right now. Is the link I'm on shareable? I
think there should be a few default sharing options (other than
Twitter/Facebook) right on the page: link, e-mail, maybe SMS?

Edit: I see the Sociable buttons that include e-mail, this should be much more
obvious. Still don't see an obvious "Copy this link".

~~~
chrisledet
Yeah the idea is that the link is sharable. We'll find a way to articulate
this better. Sorry.

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fduran
Nice. Seems similar in functionality to <http://ge.tt/> and others.

Does anyone know of a service that allows for easy upload and management
(search, tags etc) of files stored in different cloud providers (S3, dropbox,
Google etc, not stored in the service)?

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JohnTitus
I tried to drop an image file. While it correctly fired the dragover
event(changed the text to "Drop it like it's hot"), it didn't prevent the
default drop event correctly - instead firefox 3.6 just showed me the image.

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bosie
same happens to me in Chrome 15.0.874.106 on OSX 10.6.8.

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rhplus
Instant short-links is a nice idea, especially if you're aiming for the
Twitter market.

Progressive enhancement would be good: the background doesn't render correctly
in IE9 making the main text impossible to read. That applies to the homepage
and the sign-up page. You'll lose potential users who will simply move on.

[http://www.webpagetest.org/results/11/11/03/JS/22M02/1_scree...](http://www.webpagetest.org/results/11/11/03/JS/22M02/1_screen.jpg)

~~~
chrisledet
> he background doesn't render correctly in IE9 making the main text
> impossible to read.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll love into it and fix this asap.

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ctdonath
"Castle is our little baby who we work on whenever we have some free time."

Perhaps true, but not inspiring for confident usage.

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mrspandex
This doesn't seem to work in Opera

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chrisledet
Please elaborate. Do you mean the drag uploading?

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eslachance
Since that's your only feature, I would assume that's what he's talking about.
Opera does not support html5 drag & drop.

Atlassian uses Google Gears as an alternative for browsers that don't support
it, and I think there are other tricks to support it, but I'm not sure.

Perhaps browser feature detection would be in order, if you're not already
doing this?

~~~
chrisledet
We're going to add a classic file upload page for those who do not have a
HTML5 supported browser. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
recursive
I've never heard of modern Opera as being considered not to support HTML5. The
concept is pretty nebulous though.

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CJefferson
You should look into putting up a DMCA link sooner, rather than later. New
file-sharing sites are often used by pirates.

EDIT: Now found such a link, under 'uploads'. It could be easier to find,
under support for example.

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syeren
Pretty site, although you're entering in a sector with a lot of competition!

I suggest you add Cntrl+V uploading of images from the clipboard; it's a great
feature which a lot of sites have overlooked.

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chrisledet
Access to the OS clipboard would require the use of Flash. I would like to
stay away from that. We'll see what our options are. Thanks for the feedback!

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shashashasha
Access to the clipboard are reasons why I still install apps like Grabbox,
Tinygrab, etc (less steps I have to take). Hesitance over the use of Flash for
a usability gain for the user seems like a silly sort of squeamishness (look
at bit.ly's copy to clipboard buttons).

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chrisledet
The Mac and Linux client is coming soon so. This should solve that problem. We
do not plan to introduce Flash on our site.

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Inebas
FYI. It can take zip files but is limited to 32MB. Looks good. Good luck!

~~~
evertonfuller
Yup! 32MB for guest uploads. And if you have an account can go up to 256MB.

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JDS950
I don't get what makes it better than like a Minus? I would like one of these
drop.io replacements to offer encryption or passwords to get to their shared
content. Similar to what dropsend does.

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evertonfuller
Our aim, as mentioned on the top of every page is to let our users "Upload and
share your files, beautifully." Key word being 'beautifully'. I really don't
see how Minus fits into that...? Looking at their front page, it's all a bunch
of noise.

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alpswd
Any reason why I would use this instead of <http://www.dropmocks.com>?
Dropmocks seems to upload significantly faster for me as well.

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chrisledet
What are the limits of dropmocks? It doesn't tell me any where on the site.

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alpswd
I've been using it for ~6 months and have never encountered any limits, file
size or bandwidth. It is open source too:
<https://github.com/glenmurphy/dropmocks>

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snorkel
I like the notion of prompting the user to drop their files on something
evocative (a castle) rather than a cold generic empty box. Good intro UX,
clever take on zero-conf.

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thorin_2
Too clever perhaps. Zero UI doesn't mean No UI. I also had to read the About
to figure out that I could drop a file onto the castle wall, which btw failed
to do anything (I assume I need a login). What's missing is something called
"Affordance" in UX nomenclature.

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skadamat
Is this a neat side project or a potential business? I've run into 50 simple,
drag / drop file uploading websites, some (somehow) with funding, like Min.us

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evertonfuller
We just made it as a side project originally, for ourselves. But then it
started to spread, so we opened it up for everybody and just seeing where it
takes us.

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davedx
The social media buttons to share an uploaded file don't seem consistent. Mail
pops up on mouseover, reddit and FB on click. (Using Chrome)

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evertonfuller
Yes, we're currently using ShareThis until we have our in-house solution
completed. So we have to live with their incompetencies until then.

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deepkut
HTML5 drag and drop? Great front end.

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evertonfuller
Yup! Thanks.

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shaunkoh
Why Castle.so over Cloud.app?

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chrisledet
You can upload a file in one step with Castle. No need to register. We're also
making an awesome Mac OS X and Linux client to go along with our awesome
service. :D

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olliesaunders
I don’t understand. How are you going to pay for all the traffic?

~~~
chrisledet
Going to introduce a freemium model soon.

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chrisledet
Sorry for the repost but the other submission seems to be dead.

