On the one hand, this is cool... on the other hand, I'll never use it (sorry).<p>I email stuff to myself on gmail because I can have thousands of things in there that I can instantly find via powerful search. And I'm fairly confident that 5 years from now they'll still be in there and just as easily discoverable.<p>While Hopper's UI is certainly better than email attachments in gmail currently are, I suspect Google will rectify that on their side much faster than Hopper will rectify my previously mentioned primary two concerns about the data I'm storing.<p>As others have already mentioned, seamless integration into email would go a long way toward getting me to use this at all. Augment instead of trying to replace is a much better strategy here.
I have DropBox, EverNote, and Springpad, on the multiple devices I use: work/home PC/laptop and smartphone.<p>The above tools serve to keep notes and files. Nevertheless I continue to use e-mail as an archiving tool because:
- it pops up unread in my inbox for later processing. If I want to use it on a specific device, I can just leave it unread until I have access to the right device.
- more importantly, email is ubiquitous, and I can have somebody else email me a file.<p>I still need convincing on what problem Hopper solves for me that the other tools don't.
That said, trivially easy drag-and-drop file storing is cool, and I for one welcome our so-simple-my-grandma-can-use-it usability overlords.
People use email because that's still the only ubiquitous app.<p>I use Dropbox and Pinboard and Instapaper. I still find myself emailing things to myself because whatever iPad app I'm using doesn't yet integrate to any of those but does have email.<p>Email also exists on all sorts of devices that don't support apps.<p>That said, nice job - the simplicity and UX is great.
There are some odd things in the Terms and Conditions:<p><i>"Pasting any of the following is forbidden and a violation of our terms of service: ... copyrighted works or links to copyrighted works that you do not own"</i> Virtually everything on the internet is under copyright, so this forbids links, a primary purpose of the site.<p><i>"Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials (information or software) on Hopper's web site for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only."</i> I don't know if I'm reading that right, but it sounds like you can't get your stuff off the site :-/
After an unmanageable number of note-to-self emails — I mean, just <i>imagine</i> having to sort through an inbox of hundreds of things you sent yourself with the expectation of following-up later — I finally transferred them all to Evernote and haven't looked back. (Really, I can't recommend using something like Evernote or OneNote more for the purpose of brain dumps).<p>The problem I see with solutions like Hopper is that they aren't ubiquitous. I have to load a website and deal with whatever interface they've decided is the 37signals-esque simple-is-best approach to solving a problem that only matters because their execution pretty decent and for that reason I come back to it more than once... At least with Evernote I can throw shit in, in whatever format I prefer, categorize it, and then come back to it later when I feel like looking at what I thought was so rad at the time. It's no wonder so many people do this over email.<p>Back when I had dial-up and wasn't online all the time, my solution to this problem was Notepad. Yes, plain old .txt. THAT's how to get shit done. Don't matter what fancy tools you use.<p>(No offense, Hopper...)
The last time I emailed a piece of text to myself was to send an api key from my computer to my iPhone so it could be used in an app. It is a one time operation where I can access the data quickly and the text remains sufficiently private.<p>With Hopper, I don't know if the text will be shared publicly on the web, and if I can rely on it, what if the server goes down or the logs are read or stolen?
I have been thinking about solving this since <a href="https://www.xkcd.com/949/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xkcd.com/949/</a> and one thing which I think most file services get wrong is that they practically require you to write down (or email to yourself) the link to the file. I don't want <a href="http://gethopper.com/$hexadecimalgibberish" rel="nofollow">http://gethopper.com/$hexadecimalgibberish</a>. I want <a href="http://gethopper.com/meaningfulfilename" rel="nofollow">http://gethopper.com/meaningfulfilename</a> If I am trying to send the file to myself because I will be on a different computer, how does this do me any good? Allowing me to make it <a href="http://gethopper.com/reallyimportantfile" rel="nofollow">http://gethopper.com/reallyimportantfile</a> then I will remember the URL and I can just put it into the URL bar instead of going to gethopper.com first.
Haha. I pasted some random text, hit "shorten link", and changed one character (out of the two-character-long shortlink) ... ended up with <a href="http://www.wtfeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fat-black-guy-taking-a-big-mac-bath.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.wtfeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fat-black-g...</a>
I created a simple notepad for personal use. It's a textbox that syncs to my server. I have a bookmark to it on my Kindle as well as a notepad widget on the new tab page of Chrome. It can also be accessed from my phone (any device with a browser, really).<p>When I'm on my computer, it's there every time I open my browser. Anywhere else, It's just a few clicks away.<p>That seems to be enough for me as I rarely need to sync files, and when I do, I have dropbox.<p>Edit: Also thought I should mention that before I created my own solution, I used Simplenote (<a href="http://simplenoteapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://simplenoteapp.com/</a>) for the webapp and iOS app. Since then they've added an API and have a few other apps I think.
How about sending <i>also</i> an email to my own inbox from every share which links to the content? Could be a good way to keep users getting back if I could just enter my email easily when trying it out.
You've certainly identified the problem, but I don't know if your proposed solution make people like me switch off of spamming one's inbox. I've already tried to switch off to RememberTheMilk, but email was just too easily accessible and too ubiquitous, something I look at all the time. I'd need a whole separate screen just to keep track of what I want to do in RTM.
It seems like a cool idea, but as time has gone on with hosted apps I always find myself now asking this before I sign up:<p><i>How will you make money to stay in business?</i><p>If you can't answer that, and you don't, I'm extremely hesitant to sign up. Personal opinion, of course.
Great work and a great first start. One thing that I find that is still missing from file-sharing is to share your stuff with people in your close vicinity. I often run into cases when I just need to quickly share images, code fragments, links, etc. with another person sitting in the same room. I can use chat (but I generally don't like going on chat while working -- too distracting), I can email (which I often do) or use a service like Dropbox (but that means you have to upload and download files). An easy clipboard that can be sharable and accessible quickly would be very useful, at least for me. Just a thought.
Is it 'Hopper' or is it 'Get Hopper'?<p>Ok, so by the title of this post, and the title on the site's front-page, I can see it's meant to be "Hopper".<p>But the site's URL is 'gethopper' and if you view one of the links created by the site there's the red 'Get Hopper' button on the top left.<p>Both of those things suggest the site is called 'Get Hopper'. To the user, what else is 'Get Hopper' meant to mean? You don't see "Get Google" or "Get bit.ly" (along with <a href="http://getbit.ly" rel="nofollow">http://getbit.ly</a>) etc. It's a little confusing.<p>Just thought you might like to know.
If you add a hot key that allows the user to automatically upload the file/image etc. it would save steps and differentiate you from email.<p>I'd probably use it, and may even pay for it depending on the price.<p>EDIT: Just because I am price sensitive doesn't mean others are (don't price it low on my comment). You also may have some lockin with this since you will have their files so keep that in mind when pricing.
I made something like this for my friend when I wanted to try out the drag/drop API. One thing I also did was give him a little bookmarklet with his hashed password that he could drag into a "login" box so he could quickly log in without typing his username and password every time. You may want to try something like that for quicker logins.<p>It looked something like...<p>hisusername:19fij12dio7giw3
I generally am active about keeping my inbox clean so anything in there is important, if its not then I delete it as I prune it everytime I check so not sure this would really be all that useful but for some people it may be, if they're too lazy to categorize / archive emails though I doubt they are going to want to use an extra app just for this.
killer feature for me:<p>screen capture to clipboard, paste to hopper, and its already uploaded and shareable. i need this like 4 times a week. i would push to buy it at work if it was priced right and based on our existing google apps, so safe for proprietary data.
You might want to know that www.hopper.com is very well funded and launching soon. I think you should rename your project... <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/hopper" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/hopper</a>
This needs to email the entire thing to me once per week before I use it, because I won't start using it if I'm not sure that it will be there in 6 months.
also check out <a href="http://ge.tt" rel="nofollow">http://ge.tt</a><p>I met these guys at SeedCamp final round. Looks like a very good file sharing product