I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"

I personally think "mobile first" should mean we force the devs to use a mobile device as their work computer until they all realize how fundamentally crippling mobile UI is and we all agree to stop shoving it on everyone.

It kinda does though, because modern software companies tend to shift focus away from projects before they get completely "done". The whole reason for "mobile first" is the tacit admission that whatever is not the primary focus will often get drastically less attention because there's already something that sorta "works".

There’s truth in what you’re saying, especially in the “things mostly suck, so expect that” world.

But in the ideal world you’re wrong... it’s fundamentally easier to start with a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on desktop than to do the opposite.

Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate, somewhat unlikely.

I've had to conclude that they think (or hope) that everybody not using a phone is using a tablet.

Yeah, but surely the vast vast majority of dropbox's business has to come from PCs. Given how hard (and wrongly) they are pushing to be a collaborative space for work documents, I think I must be correct about this. I know it's cool and all to imagine everyone working on their phones, I just can't see that as a viable work process atm.

but who uses the desktop web interface? don't dropbox users use the desktop app?

Some people use it by dropping files up to share with people, and don't use the syncing capabilities. It's a reasonably common use case, I've noticed.

Some people also use it like a USB dongle, and drop files up manually, then download them on computers they don't have installation privileges on.

I use it to sync the pictures and videos from my phone, which is then synced to my desktop at home, and then deleted from dropbox and thus also the phone. Automatically. If my phone gets stolen (or data deleted by some overzealous border patrol goon) it doesn't matter as much as it would have otherwise.

I do, because all the people at my office using the desktop app complain about bad syncs, sudden filling up of the local hard drive and general slowness

Sarcasm is hard. Unless I'm mistaken, you're imitating Blizzard and Diablo Immortal. If not then I think your comment comes across as extremely blind to a large segment of users.

I was forced to use web interface after app reinstall because Dropbox free account now supports only 3 linked devices (and I have 7).

Their loudest majority is probably mobile then.

Not necessarily a majority.

Man that page is garbage.

With JavaScript disabled, you get a big white page of nothing. Not to mention the full screen menu as was mentioned.

They probably designed it to work on the CEO's tablet and called it a day.

Hamburgers and Heiroglyphs, GUI of the future!

At least Dropbox hasn't gone full in on the Heiroglyph side of the fad, they still have text labels for buttons, so you can understand what they do by looking at them and reading them.

The hieroglyphs are beyond me. It's literally making up your own alphabet not to mind language. Might be the ultimate sign of the over indulgence of developers/designers. Each gets their own perfect world which we must spend the time decrypting

That is pretty easy - you don't need to support text in multiple languages, which is both difficult, a tad expensive, and slows down your velocity (I think the last on is the biggest issue).

I wish at least they used the egyptian ones. I 'd love to learn their language

Then you'd love OS/Iris, which died a long time ago but was later resurrected!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris_myth#Death_and_resurrec...

Press (Stork) to save!

Maybe they try to save on i18n.

I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.

I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so.

Insane!

> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.

Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do and brake it beyond all repair.

> I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so.

> Insane!

I'm shocked you used such a © "word". The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.

> Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do

Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismissable.

> The new way to have fun is to be in a meeting and see the presenter trying for 5 minutes to find something in the ribbon menu.

The Ribbon is far superior to the old teetering tower of random menus, toolbars, and panels. Everything is in a single logical place, with (almost) every button having a text label and many having intuitive icons. And now it has a search bar.

I'm fine with the ribbon, but good God do I hate the full screen save & open menus.

They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud.

I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects.

The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.

There hasnt been a good excel released in 20 years. Libreoffice is pretty hideous, gnumeric is maybe a bit better. I rely on excel key shortcuts which didnt change even when the menus they referenced disappeared. Libreoffice has some but not all of them. Google sheets does better but my dev network is airgapped so that doesn't help.

What I refer to is the picture like here:

https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-o...

Clicking on the File menu gets you

"Protect Document -- Protect Document"

"Check for Issues -- Inspect Document"

and

"Manage Versions -- Versions"

effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu?

And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.

> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.

That's been the case for I think a decade now. Maybe longer.

To be fair, now days they make really good use of that space. Earlier iterations of that UI were pretty bad, but a giant list of recent documents, a list of recent document templates, and all the main commands to do things (save, open) are positions to the left where they have always been.

Given that Word now days auto-saves (about time!), the main thing I'm going into the File menu for is to switch to a different file, at which point the file menu showing me a list of, well, files, is pretty useful to be honest.

Also it has a search box, and search boxes are nice, I welcome UI changes that allow for more search boxes in the world.

I think it auto saves only for Office 365 or SharePoint based documents. It definitely doesn't auto save my documents when they are local or on a network share.

One Drive files as well.

Strange it doesn't do local, but I imagine there are legacy reasons for that. Everything in Office is old. Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.

> Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on.

YMMV

Well engineered and coded decisions made in the age of single user desktops are still well engineered. Hard for someone in 1995 to predict the need for a file format that supports real time coauthoring with automatic saving and complete revision control of every edit.

Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory.

Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections.

Oops.

I went to Dropbox to try this out but got redirected to "Dropbox Business" which doesn't have a hamburger.

And then spent nearly 5 minutes trying to get back to "Regular Dropbox".

But wait... I'm at the root of dropbox.com. Is... Dropbox "non-business" dead? I stopped using it a while ago because of their inexorable push into "enterprise" features that I didn't care about, but I never expected them to outright kill the product.

Looks like it only does this on sufficiently "small" screens. This is what it looks like on my external display: https://imgur.com/a/DJBiYJ6

Oh you're right. Interesting. My browser is 1134x1080. I guess maybe in today's world of super high res phones that could be considered a "mobile display".

Any CSS that doesn't take screen density into account is doing it wrong, though.

I don't think it has anything to do with resolution. I'm getting the same thing as the parent on my 1366x768.

Edit: It's actually the width that matters. After reducing it a bit it will show the hamburger menu.

The media query for the hamburger button is max-width: 1366px, so you just met the cut off. I couldn't find a media query for the menu itself, but I suspect since the hamburger button is what allows it to get created, they didn't feel the need.

I don't really understand what's wrong with a full-screen modal menu, or how that means "this is for mobile." It's true that it looks a bit stark on their homepage where there are only 2 links, but it's probably a fairly sensible extensible design that works well when there are many more links or things to see.

It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."

> I don't really understand what's wrong with a full-screen modal menu, or how that means "this is for mobile." It's true that it looks a bit stark on their homepage where there are only 2 links, but it's probably a fairly sensible extensible design that works well when there are many more links or things to see.

You never used a computer? There is a thing called a mouse which you have to move to the bottom of the screen to select the bloody thing. I'm shocked that Alan Kay did had the glorious idea of the full screen menu.

> It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."

How to say it without resorting to medical condition: to throw away years of working things in GUI and to come with an "UX" which has the functionality of windows 1.0 shows some mental development problems to say the least.

Because I'm trying to read off some details on a document I have open on the side while interacting with the menu and then it goes full screen and obscures everything.

Fair enough. I only see two links in the menu, so surely the menu can quickly be viewed and closed.

Mine's at 1280 and it's full menu, almost entirely whitespace. Makes it kinda fun though, feels like finding an easter egg.

In fairness, Dropbox's primary interface on desktops is "my files are there" and nothing else. I can understand why they'd spend most of their UX effort concentrating on platforms where it's not as transparent.

you used to click on the icon in the taskbar and get a menu only. Now you get a full popup with a home screen , advertisements and "notifications" (even though windows has integrated notifications. Never used it

I have never clicked on this before, but mine on Windows 10 isn't what you described, and even if it was... why would I ever click on it? My files are backed up and show up on other machines. They could put animal porn in the UI and I don't think I'd notice.

I can't see the hamburger menu.

But here is the upper part of what I can see: https://imgur.com/eRFnDo6

Isn't is beautiful? How the image layer is put over half of the text line?

Oh, and the right part (white background) only appears after a couple of seconds. At first it shows the continuation of the blue background scree, with 2 'menu' items: "Se connecter" (log in) and "S'inscrire" (sign in). So if you try to click on "sign in", by the time your click is registered, it ends up on the white background item which appears at the same place: "Télécharger" (download).

Wonderful.

> just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

Wow that is sloppy.

That's not true, their desktop breakpoint is 1024px. If the window is wider than that, there's no hamburger menu, and clicking "Sign in" reveals a menu that takes up 1/3 of the right side of the screen.

This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/nmi0FHQ.png

For me the hamburger button's media query is set to a width of 1366px.

I don't have a dropbox account. I do notice no matter what I always end up at `https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2`, so I may somehow be being put into an AB test. Even an incognito window does that. The name `dbv2` might imply a new version of the site that is in the works? Shrug.

Ah, I think you'll see what I see at https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv1

Yours looks like https://www.dropbox.com/business

How is that not pancakes? But ye, it's way to big. If they have to do it fullscreen, atleast put the menu options in the centre of the screen not downwards ...