'I might be working on PowerPoint,' he added. 'It happens across multiple content types - be it images, code, tables, even tasks.' And that clutter extends to the tools being used. 'Work today is really fragmented,' said product manager Matteus Pan. You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. In particular, the company made it so that you can use its app to share pretty much anything, regardless of what tools you might be using.

Dropbox specifically said that the purpose of Paper was to keep the focus on sharing ideas rather than formatting. You can do your basic bold, italics, underline and strikethrough formatting and format text into a block quote, but that's about it.

Each is designated by a colored cursor, and the user's full name is displayed in the margins, crediting their contributions to the file.įrom a text perspective, Paper is quite basic there's only one font and three sizes available. As in Google Docs, multiple users can edit a document at the same time. But while IA Writer and its ilk are designed for solo composition, Paper is all about working together.

At first glance, Paper's UI is reminiscent of the scores of minimalist, lightweight text-editing apps that have come out in the past few years, such as IA Writer. It's far too early to tell if Paper will be able to keep up with entrenched tools from Google, Microsoft and many others - but there are definitely some interesting features here that make it worth keeping an eye on.įor now, Paper is a web-only app that you can access through your Dropbox account, although the company says it'll have a mobile app ready to go when the product comes out of beta.

You'll still need an invite, but the company gave us a preview of what's probably the biggest addition to Dropbox in years. But starting today, the product is being officially branded as Dropbox Paper and the beta test is expanding significantly. Six months ago, Dropbox quietly announced a collaborative note-taking tool called Notes and launched it in an invite-only beta test.

Dropbox paper notifications