Writebox – Syncs with Dropbox. Chrome, iOS, Web

Writebox – Syncs with Dropbox. Chrome, iOS, Web(writeboxapps.com)

47 points by wib 13 years ago | 25 comments

Similar to TextDrop, but free (as in beer) and without some of the handier NV-like features.

Kluny 13 years ago |

Looks cool. I corrected some of your spelling and grammar errors. Many US customers distrust sites that have poor English in their copy. Hope it helps.

ID and Password

We don't store your Dropbox and Google Drive passwords. (We cannot access this information.)

We store your OAuth token for Dropbox and Google Drive in our server.

We store a cookie in your browser.

We store your e-mail address for Dropbox and Google Drive in our server. This is for you to identify what account you use on Writebox.

File Contents

We don't store your file contents in our server, but save in your local cache.

We don't read your file contents, we just convert file encoding to show characters correctly.

We store the filepath of the thing you last opened in Writebox in our server. This is for syncing the last edit of the file across devices.

Logging

We collect analytics data through Google Analytics when you using Writebox. This is for the purpose of service improvement.

We don't track individual users.

wib 13 years ago | |

Thanks but also sorry, because I should clarify—it's not my app, I just found it last night while looking for just this for a new Chromebook. I'm a heavy NValt user and there's sadly no Dropbox support on ARM as yet. Also saw that no one had posted to HN yet so thought I'd share.

Dev is a Japanese fellow on Twitter @kazuhiroshibuya, I'm sure he'll appreciate new users and any kudos. It's really well-designed and like others who commented here, I'm very glad for the prominent privacy disclosures on the homepage.

niggler 13 years ago | |

You missed the big one on the main page:

Helps you to concentrate on writing

lux 13 years ago | |

Dang, I got all excited about the Google Drive support, but it won't be in the iOS version til the next release (according to the developer's Twitter feed). Something to look forward to now :)

tonetheman 13 years ago |

Probably not spelled right... but funny.

We don't store your file contents in our server, but save on your local for cash.

Need to change cash to cache maybe?... or maybe not. Nice biz model. :)

christiangenco 13 years ago | |

Came here to say this. There'd be a lot more developers on the Dropbox API if you could exchange saving file contents on someone's Dropbox account for money...

prairiedock 13 years ago |

Chromebooks out of the box lack any kind of straightforward text editor which will edit local files and/or files on Google Drive. (Google Drive is much more convenient to use on chromebooks than Dropbox.) Writebox looks as if it might be a candidate to fill this void, for it loads and saves files on Google Drive, even though 'distraction-free' tends to be code for 'featureless'.

Unfortunately, it's got a serious bug, fatal for my usage, which the developer promised to fix over a month ago but which has not been fixed yet. If you edit and save a web page (i.e. an .html file) on Google Drive, Chrome OS no longer recognizes the file as a web page to be viewed in the browser, but only as a text file, to be viewed as text or edited.

Eventually, this might be a good app. In the meantime, if you need a text editor for a chromebook, put it in developer mode, install Ubuntu 'cli-extras' with the Crouton script, and 'sudo apt-get install nano'. (Vim is also automatically installed by Crouton.)

cannonjunior 13 years ago |

This looks brilliant. I agree with Kluny's first comment; if someone has an email for @kazuhiroshibuya, please tell him there is currently a spelling and grammatical error on the landing page. Suggest the second sentence be changed from: "Writebox helps you to concentrate to writing and seamlessly sync your wiring text accross all your devices." To: "Writebox helps you concentrate on writing and seamlessly syncs your text writings across all your devices."

MrDrone 13 years ago |

Definitely a nice app in a crowded market though. What do you offer that say something like Draftin.com doesn't?

motter 13 years ago |

I really appreciate the prominently placed policies about credential and data storage.

MatthewPhillips 13 years ago |

This is awesome. I've been looking for a web-based simple text editor (an iA Writer for the web) and this is the best one I've seen yet. Will definitely be using it.

omervk 13 years ago | |

The fact that iA have decided not to release a version of iA Writer for the web says something about this product.

PankajGhosh 13 years ago |

This looks great. I appreciate your efforts to keep the editor minimal but effective. Congrats!

I would like to request a feature to sync with Evernote.

727374 13 years ago |

To save on Dropbox you have to give it access to your entire dropbox? Maybe that's a dropbox limitation, but no thanks.

ghostnappa 13 years ago | |

yeah, that is a dropbox limitation. O'reilly and other sites offer dropbox integration, but they are actually given permission to the entirety of dropbox although they just create a root folder and deposit files normally.

jpdevereaux 13 years ago | | |

Ehh when integrating with the Dropbox API you're given a choice of "full Dropbox" or "app folder", the latter option creates a folder in your Dropbox which is all your app can access. For an app like this "full Dropbox" is probably more useful (so that you can edit existing files), but in O'Reilly's case it seems they should have chosen "app folder".

727374 13 years ago | | |

Thanks for clarifying... I hope dropbox improves this.

tehwalrus 13 years ago |

I would love this if it had markdown hinting support (impossible to escape in a hacker news comment...)

adeaver 13 years ago | |

I second the desire for markdown hinting. I've been using this for a while via Chrome for writing and it's very good, very happy that it detects when there is a newer version in Dropbox (don't know about Drive, don't have that connected. Just missing that one piece for me.

omaranto 13 years ago | |

Is 'markdown hinting' just 'markdown' or is it something new markdown related that I might enjoy?

tehwalrus 13 years ago | | |

I mean, since this is single window (so no side-by-side source and compiled) that when you surround with asterisks, the asterisks are still visible, but the whole word is italicised. it is often performed by markdown syntax highlighters - if you're on OS X, try textmate 2 with the extension ".md" to see what I mean (it makes a wonderful job of semi-previewing my octopress blog entries.)

nthnclrk 13 years ago | |

I second this. Markdown hinting would be brilliant for this.

jontomato 13 years ago |

Simplenote's reliability hasn't been so great lately. This looks like a nice alternative.

netcraft 13 years ago |

It says Chrome - does it not work properly in firefox?

wib 13 years ago | |

Haven't tested in Firefox. I assume the webapp works just fine, but there's a dedicated Chrome extension.