As Dropbox moves to an Electron app, "UWP is as alive as S Mode"

Dropbox is replacing their Windows 10 UWP app with a new app based on Electron.

Dropbox notes:

It’s the Dropbox you know and love, but better. It’s a single workspace to organize your content, connect your tools, and bring everyone together, wherever you are.

Dropbox explains the new features as below:

Bring your content together

Building on our history of helping organize your content, the new Dropbox brings cloud content together with traditional files so you can keep it all in one place. Now you can:

• Create, access, and share cloud content like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides and Microsoft Office files within Dropbox. You can also choose to open Microsoft Office files in Office Online or the Google web editor.

• Create and store shortcuts to any website alongside your content in Dropbox. Shortcuts make it easy to keep content from online project management and productivity tools—even news articles and wiki pages—together with the rest of your work in Dropbox.

• Use one search box, not 10, to search across all of your content. You’ll see traditional files, cloud content, shortcuts, and files you’ve chosen not to download through our selective sync feature—all in one place.

And don’t worry—you can still organize all your work from the Dropbox folder in Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder.

Bring your tools together

Bringing all of your content together is just the start. We’re also making sure the apps you use throughout the day are an integral part of this new workspace. Building on our existing integrations with tools from companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and Autodesk, we’re introducing three new integrations. They’ll work seamlessly with Dropbox to help bring your content into context:

• Collaborate with Slack. The new Dropbox and Slack integration helps bridge the gap between content and communication, letting you collaborate seamlessly on shared content. You’ll be able to start Slack conversations and share content to Slack channels directly from Dropbox.

• Video conference with Zoom. By connecting Zoom and your calendar to Dropbox, you can now bring your work into video conferences. From Dropbox, you’ll be able to add and join Zoom Meetings. And during Zoom Meetings, you’ll be able to share files from your Dropbox.

• Manage projects with Atlassian. Coming soon, enhanced integrations that we’re building with Atlassian will help teams more effectively manage their projects and content.

Bring everyone together

It isn’t just about content and tools. The heart of all that work is the people making it happen, so we’ve also built new features to help your team stay in sync. We’ve transformed shared folders into rich workspaces where teams can:

• Get coordinated by adding descriptions to folders to help the team understand more about the work they’re doing. Key content can be highlighted by pinning it to the top of a workspace, and you can even @mention people and assign to-dos so everyone knows what happens next.

• Gain visibility into the latest progress on shared work. The new Dropbox lets you see file activity—including viewer info and team collaboration on Dropbox content in Slack and Zoom—and keep tabs with a new team activity feed.

• Share feedback by creating comments right alongside your content, across desktop, web, and mobile.

The new app is available via Dropbox’s Early Access program, which any user can opt in to.

At the same time Dropbox has renamed their UWP app to Dropbox in SMode, noting in the description;

Dropbox for Windows 10 in S mode makes it easy to share large files with anyone, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.

Famed Windows developer Rudy Huyn is also the official developer of the Dropbox app and a major proponent of UWP, but the difference between the capabilities of the new and old apps is very clear.

As the owner of Electron Microsoft, of course, wins in both cases, but as WalkingCat notes, UWP is about as alive as Windows 10 in S-Mode, and it may be time for even the naysayers (who have launched a UWP PR campaign recently) to admit this too.

Read more about the new DropBox app here.