

Dropbox - No release candidate for almost nine months and counting - BlazingFrog
http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=27724&amp;replies=1#post-173170

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swombat
Lesson learned: even if you build an amazing product that basically is magic
and way better than anything else out there, there will still be assholes
bitching about how you're just not doing enough to meet their inflated
expectations.

~~~
ary
Exactly. Here I am thinking Dropbox is awesome because it's both stable and
_just works_. Who knew a product needed to have a steady stream of feature
updates until it subsumed the very operating system it sat on top of.

~~~
unicornporn
I have three computers running OS X. Currently Dropbox eats around 33% CPU on
all of these modern machines. Am I the only one experiencing these problems?

~~~
ary
Do you have processes that actively write to files in your Dropbox folder on a
regular basis? Dropbox averages < 0.5% CPU on my Mac, but your mileage may
vary. I do consider even that much somewhat odd considering that I'm a very
occasional user.

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gabbott
As a member of the Dropbox team, I can say without a doubt that everyone on
the Dropbox client team is working hard to make the next version of the
Dropbox client as stable as possible before release. The Release Notes Page (
<https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes> ) shows that we have been making fixes
to the next (testing) version of the client on a near daily basis for months.

In many ways the new client has been updated to be as stable if not more so
than the current stable build. However, new features open new possibilities
for bugs and we want to make sure that our software is bulletproof before we
label it a stable build. Pushing the client out before completion would be far
more dangerous in our opinion. I do apologize that we have not been able to
release the latest build sooner, but I can assure you that we are working hard
to get the current release ready.

While the client has been under development, we have been able to complete a
large number of other features including mobile clients for all of the major
handheld devices, an API for interacting with Dropbox as well as numerous
improvements to the Dropbox web portal.

I can assure you (because I can see the client team right now) that they are
working as hard as ever to get the current testing build ready for every one
of our users.

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javery
When we get users like this at TekPub we kindly refund all of their money and
cancel their service - life is too short to deal with assholes.

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BlazingFrog
Regardless of what one thinks about the service vs. product discussion, it's
hard to argue that no official Dropbox client released in 9 months is
reasonable. Especially when important features are not in the current client
(selective syncing, performance improvement...)

~~~
wzdd
I don't see why it is prima facie unreasonable. I use plenty of applications
which are at least nine months old (including the Dropbox client). None of
them has failed due to old age yet...

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storborg
"Development clients are inherently unstable. If a dev client blows up on a
client's machine and deletes all of his or her data - or releases it into the
wild - the customer bears the full liability for having taken a chance on a
dev client."

How is that any different with a client that isn't "beta" or "dev"? What are
you going to do, bring a civil suit against Dropbox because a bug corrupted
your data?

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andre3k1
I would venture to say that they have something very large in the works. I
checked out their team page and they have quite a few employees. They have
been funded and are also looking for new hires.

<http://www.dropbox.com/about>

Regardless, when you purchase something you are buying its current iteration,
not something that you hope for it to one day be. This was alluded to in the
comments of the original article and I thought it was worth repeating.

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thehodge
Sure he was an arsehole about it but he had a question, I say this as a
dropbox pro customer, closing the thread with the Happy syncin'! signoff comes
across really badly for me, It would have take 20 seconds to say something
like, we don't comment on releases or things were tougher than we thought they
would be (Hell Valve delay every bloody release but at least they are upfront
about it) but ignoring the issue and making a snappy comment just leaves a bad
taste..

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makeramen
That's only for the desktop client. They've been updating their mobile clients
quite rapidly, as well as promoting their API allowing for awesome apps like
PlainText (<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/plaintext>)

