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Published on June 20, 2009

Would you all forgive us if we said we were sorry for not posting for a while? :(  We're still alive, I swear!

A lot has happened since we last spoke.  Continuing from where our last post left off, Dropbox won its first Rock Band duel after an extremely close (a <1% point difference!) battle with Mozy.  Hats off to the Mozy team for trekking out to San Francisco for our epic showdown :).   Also, special thanks to our friends at Justin.tv for hosting and broadcasting the event. We've had four additions to our steadily growing team; Jon Grall (product lead), Andrea Smith (customer support), Will Stockwell (mobile device and iPhone guru), and a new intern, Kevin Modzelewski.  Welcome!  Dropbox also hit the milestone of syncing files for one million users (and approaching one and a half this week), and we'll be giving out a prize to celebrate the occasion — more on that below. Development continues to pick up steam here at the Dropbox HQ, and our teams are busy working on features such as LAN P2P syncing, the iPhone app, and continual optimizations to the Dropbox client.  In terms of finished work, the last few months have resulted in huge improvements of Dropbox's memory footprint (a reduction of 10+ MB in small Dropboxes and much more for larger Drobpoxes), the announcement of our 100GB plan and the release of the Linux CLI. As for the stuff I'm most involved in, the web team is preparing to roll out a bunch of changes to make your navigation of the web interface much friendlier (and hopefully prettier).  This redesign is Dropbox's most ambitious to date, and I'd just like to put a few of my mockups out here to test the waters a bit.

(click to view the full size)

As you can see here, we'll be changing the top nav a bit and reducing/merging some of the items that are currently on your Dropbox homepage.  The idea is to allow users to arrive at a portal where they have immediate access to the actions they want to do without having to swim through a pile of fluff to get there.

The way you view your Dropbox on the web will be very similar to what you've grown accustomed to, but with a few changes:

files
files
(click to view the full size)

As you can see, we've introduced a folder tree to the left side of the file browser.  This will let you hop to the folders of your choice without having to press Back or 'Up one level' multiple times.  And, yes!  It will indeed be possible to perform actions on more than one file at once.  Heck, you can even drag 8 different files and folders at a time to the folder of your choice :) Anyways, I should remind everyone that this is still definitely a work in progress so I'd be more than happy to hear any advice/critiques for my work.  Don't be afraid to tell me what you'd like included in your Dropbox web experience. To celebrate our 1 millionth user (and apologize for our long absence on the blog), we'd like to award 5 lifetime 50GB accounts to our users.  If you're a paying user already, then this will just get added to your existing quota.  Just head to the giveaway thread in the Dropbox forums to enter.  Good luck, and thanks to everyone for bearing with us these past two years :).  We promise we'll post more often!

PS-- You can view the Mozy vs. Dropbox Rock Band battle here.