Juli Clover:
Dropbox users who have a free Dropbox account are now limited to using that account on a total of three devices, according to new information added to the Dropbox website and spotted on Twitter (via The Verge).
Dropbox says that as of March 2019, “Basic” users, which is the free tier, can add their account to three devices. Dropbox users who already have their account attached to more than three devices can keep them linked, but there will be no way to link additional devices when over the three device limit.
If you have a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone that’s already three devices. I imagine this will accelerate the trend of people switching to iCloud Drive. I’ve been working towards that myself and keep Dropbox quit most of the time on my Mac, as its file change monitoring is disruptive.
Previously:
Update (2019-03-15): Brian Stucki:
I made the jump from Dropbox to iCloud Drive this year and it’s been really nice. If you really want to rid your Mac of the app itself, Transmit from @panic does a really nice job of logging into Dropbox for any shared folders you still need to access.
Clark Goble:
Obvious way around - multiple accounts and then share folders.
Peter N Lewis:
The problem with all these subscription products is all the companies want $10/month. If DropBox offered a $10/year plan (or even $20/year) they could probably make a fortune. Instead they just keep trying to drive away low volume customers. It is just not worth $120/year.
Tanner Bennett:
Its malicious, fake system dialog which attempts to steal your user account password so it can keep itself enabled in accessibility settings is also disruptive, among other things.
Kirk McElhearn:
Back around 2014-15, I took out a pro subscription with 1 TB, but there was no way I could make it worthwhile. I don’t need 1 TB, and even if I did, it wouldn’t fit on my Macs; I could put that much data on an external drive connected to my iMac, but now my MacBook Pro. (Yes, I know, selective sync; but I still don’t need that much storage.)
The problem is that Dropbox doesn’t have a low-priced, low-GB plan. I’d happily pay, say, $20 a year for 100 GB, because I am aware that I’ve been getting this service for free for many years. But I’m not spending $100 a year.
Business Cloud Dropbox iCloud Drive iOS iOS 12 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 10.14 Mojave
Jeff Johnson:
I couldn’t reproduce the crash myself, so I did a bit of searching on the web, and I discovered the explanation on Stack Overflow. The function NetService.dictionary(fromTXTRecord:) is declared to return [String:Data], but when the TXT Record does not have the proper key=value format, CFNetwork inserts kCFNull in the dictionary where Data is expected. This causes Swift to crash.
In Objective-C, the method +[NSNetService dictionaryFromTXTRecordData:] does not crash. However, it still behaves badly, because it is declared to return NSDictionary<NSString*,NSData*>*, but the dictionary can contain NSNull instead of NSData, so your app could still crash if the code trusts the compiler and calls NSData methods on NSNull.
Needless to say, this bug is awful. It affects both macOS and iOS. Moreover, the bug has existed for more than two years, which is even more awful. Fortunately, developers can work around the bug. In Objective-C a workaround is easy, because we can just check the returned dictionary for NSNull values at runtime. In Swift, however, the crash occurs before we can check the dictionary, so we need to try something else.
He worked around it using the Core Foundation version of the method, which has a different signature and so bridges differently. But it seems to also work to disable the bridging by casting with as NSDictionary.
Previously: Swift Subclass of NSTextStorage Is Slow Because of Swift Bridging.
Bug Cocoa iOS iOS 12 Mac macOS 10.14 Mojave Networking Programming Swift Programming Language
Apple:
This story can only be viewed on the App Store in iOS 11 or later on your iPhone or iPad.
Brent Simmons:
The bummer about these articles is that the full thing can only be read in the iOS App Store. It would be nice if they actually appeared on the web, too.
I’d like the entire store to work in a browser.
Jeff Johnson:
And if only you could follow daily App Store features using some open internet format like... RSS?
App Store iOS iOS 12 RSS Web
Sketch (tweet):
When we started Sketch back in 2011, the design landscape was very different to the one we know now. Innovation had all but stopped and existing tools were not serving designers’ needs. We stepped into the market and broke it open, paving the way for a new wave of design tools, built on top of our open plugin system, and Sketch became the foundation of what design is today.
[…]
With that in mind, we are incredibly pleased to announce that we have raised $20 million in Series A funding from Benchmark. This represents our first capital raise since we started working on Sketch nearly 10 years ago and we’re sure you’re asking, “why now?“
Simply put, this will allow us to serve your needs better, faster. Benchmark has been on this journey many times before with companies like Elastic, Twitter, Uber and Zendesk. With such an impressive track record, we think they’re the perfect partner to help us create and scale the best version of the Sketch platform.
They’re going to make Sketch for Teams and also a Web version.
Dan Counsell:
Ah crap. I fear this great app may be ruined over the coming years by external pressures from investors. Fingers crossed it works out.
Previously: What It’s Like to Take on Venture Capital Investment.
Business Mac Mac App macOS 10.14 Mojave Sketch Web
