Remember ProjectComposer, the mysterious productivity app Dropbox began testing in the spring? It turns out Project Composer was the code name for Dropbox Paper, a collaborative note-taking app that works inside of Dropbox, which the company quietly launched in beta last month.
On Wednesday, at the company’s Dropbox Open event in San Francisco, Dropbox announced the service will be coming out of beta in 2016. (Those interested in checking it out can sign up for the beta now.) In the meantime, Mashable was able to take Paper for a spin.
The best way to describe Paper is a cross between Google Docs and Medium. It has many of the formatting, realtime editing and collaboration features of Google Docs with a design that’s visually similar to Medium’s minimalist aesthetic.
That said, Dropbox is positioning Paper as a collaboration tool, rather than a full-on document editor. So while it has the basic formatting tools you’d expect — you can format headers, add links and lists, and format text styles — it lacks some customization features. You can’t change the font or the color of the text, for example.
The best thing about Paper is how easily it handles different types of files and formatted text. You can add images, checklists, tables and files from your Dropbox accounts to notes and each item renders within the document exactly the way you’d expect.
The company clearly put a lot of thought into making sure Paper could work for a variety of different teams. You can embed photos, Pinterest boards, Sound Cloud clips, Facebook posts and just about anything else with an HTML code. If you just want to add a long string of code, it can handle that, too.
The collaboration tools are also really simple, but effective. Anyone with access to the document can add a comment to any line of text, photo, file attachment or string of code. Comments are shown to collaborators in realtime and you can have conversations within notes through comments. You can also add fun emoji-like animations.
Though Dropbox is likely hoping its growing business base will use Paper, it’s also open to the company’s free users and Dropbox Pro subscribers. The company has recently added several new features that make it easier for people to use their Dropbox accounts for work — like teamsand file request features — and Paper certainly adds to these capabilities.
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Source: Mashable