Dropbox 3.9.4 for iOS came out this week and the new features are tiny additions: you can now preview .eps and .svg files in the app and if you know what they are, you already have ways to view them. Yet, these small improvements add up and over the space of the last few updates, Dropbox for iOS has become ever more useful.
Maybe it's just that we don't use the app very often that we didn't see the changes for ages. Dropbox is an immensely successful service which deserves glory for being so immensely useful. Across Macs, iOS, PCs, everywhere, Dropbox quietly does a big job and makes it look effortless. If you save a document to your Dropbox folder on your iMac, you can turn around the MacBook behind you and open the same document right away.
You can go to a friend's PC and do the same. In theory you can go to your iPhone and do it there too but here's why it's different and here's why it needs an app. Until recently, there was no way to handle documents and files on an iPhone except in the app that created them. So you could open, change and save Pages documents in Pages but nowhere else. To open, copy, save, change or share documents from your Dropbox folder, then, you needed a Dropbox app.
You've got one. You've had it for years so you're fine: you can see your the contents of your Dropbox folder and you can preview documents to see what's inside them. Except, there is one other difference. No matter what iPhone or iPad you've got, no matter how much room there is in it after installing iOS 8, you have more room on your Mac. If you don't use Dropbox much then you could find that you get all your documents onto your iPhone at the same time but in practice that is never going to happen. Instead, the Dropbox app maintains a list of all your documents and it goes to get them for you whenever you want one.
In day to day use you'll find that you only ever need a couple or three of your documents and you can have them in a very long list of files. Our favourite change in these latest few releases is how by default that list of files is now really a list of what you've worked on recently.
That's what you've recently used on Dropbox on any of your devices. It is ridiculous how great that one improvement is but we've used the Dropbox app much more since we found it.
Dropbox 3.9.4 requires iOS 7.0 and is
free on the App Store. The app and its functions are free but you're using it to store and copy documents and that takes space. For free you get 2GB and you can get more by paying a subscription fee which begins at $10 per month.
Who is Dropbox 3.9.4 for:
If you used a previous Dropbox app on your iPhone then not only should you get this but you already have.
Who is Dropbox 3.9.4 not for:
If you're wedded to OneDrive or any other Dropbox rival, the new version of the app is good but it's yet another tool to learn to use.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
Tags: software, Apple, hands on, review,
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