Ive had a chance to test out odrive on my laptop running Windows 8.1. Here are some initial impressions after installing and linking my Google Drive and OneDrive accounts: System Tray Icon - Double-clicking the systray icon doesnt do anything. Most icons down there do something when you double-click them. The Dropbox icon, for example, opens the Dropbox folder on my computer. Similarly, it would be nice if odrive did the same thing and opened up the Odrive folder. - When no accounts are linked, mouse movement over the various link options in the Add Link submenu have a chance of dismissing the entire right-click menu. I verified that this is the case when there are no links - with Google Drive and OneDrive linked, this behavior disappeared. - Im not a fan of the Tutorial menu item linking to a Word doc. Not everyones going to have something installed that can read .docx files, especially with the cross-platform nature of your service. Have you considered linking to a page on the onedrive website? Or what about a plaintext README file? At least that way youd have a tutorial that is guaranteed readable on every machine that odrive could be installed on. odrive Folder Right-click Menu - The wording on Unsync All Files is a little ambiguous. Currently, it sounds like that might unsync ALL files in a particular Link (i.e. completely unsync Google Drive/OneDrive/etc...), not just the folder thats been right-clicked. Id recommend renaming it to something like Unsync All Subfiles or Unsync Folder Contents. onedrive Website - The odrive website isnt the best introduction to the service. I read the whole thing twice and even then I had to infer what odrive is about. It wasnt until I installed the program and played around with it that I realized what it is. Maybe Im being too hard on the site since odrive is still in beta; however, it could really benefit from some screenshots or a screencast of the application in action, as well as some clarification on what Oxygen Cloud-specific terms like sync folder and intelligently and progessively sync. - I just thought of something as I wrote the above paragraph: the odrive website needs to emphasize that its a way to consolidate all of your CLOUD STORAGE files and folders. For example: Sync all your apps Photo albums on Facebook and Flickr? Files on Dropbox? Projects on Google Drive? odrive links to different apps and turns them into a folder for you. Now you dont need to login and launch a dozen apps just to get to your stuff! This paragraph is very confusing because Facebook and Flickr are services that provide apps. Dropbox and Google Drive are cloud storage services that provide apps. I feel that odrive should emphasize the fact that it lets users access all of these cloud storage services from one location on their, as opposed to framing it as a way of accessing the contents of their constituent apps (since those apps pull content from their respective services). odrive is basically a mash-up of the web-based Jolicloud service with a Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive-esque desktop client. For users of multiple cloud storage services, odrive replaces the installation of all of those various desktop sync applications with a single one capable of linking up with innumerable present and future storage services. I think the site needs some rewording to make this point more clear and give potential users a better idea of what theyll get out of using your service. So there you go, some initial impressions. I hope I wasnt too harsh! Ill run with odrive for a few more days and put it through its paces. Ill probably be back with more observations and suggestions for improvement. :)
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:45:27 +0000
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