@gmph Thank you Graham :) Honestly we've been ideating and working on this for quite sometime. Even before the file requests feature ( I believe that was rolled out on Jun 17th). With balloon, its more of custom links supporting multi file uploads. Comes with a nice little image preview too! In the next version, we will be rolling out a password protection feature too. Let us know if you have any other questions!
@gmph Graham, Balloon and Dropbox file requests aren't too dissimilar. Balloon is just a friendlier and more playful 3rd party version of it. But with plans to integrate other cloud services, it will grow beyond Dropbox file requests capabilities.
@jsngr Supporting multiple third-party services for uploading might be interesting too! For example if someone had a Google Drive folder with photos from an event and you had a Dropbox folder, making transferring between those services as simple as Balloon is now would be nice.
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I thought that DropBox already announced this functionality recently? Isn't that what "file requests" does?
As others have said. I dont' think your website really explains what you do at all. It would be great if you could show some screenshots or something.
@_jacksmith It is in fact very similar. But with the opportunity to support more than just Dropbox, Balloon becomes more versatile, and a friendlier and more playful version of it. Can you elaborate more on what you're finding confusing? If the tagline or homepage copy isn't doing it justice, something isn't right. Have you tried it? Just connect your Dropbox, create a Balloon, and share it so that people can send you files directly to your Dropbox, that's all :) Send me something to give it a try https://balloon.io/jordan
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@jsngr I didn't want to connect my account before knowing what it does. the example is helpful. So to understand, presently there's actually no difference vs Dropbox file requests, but in the future you'd support more platforms, which would be the difference?
@datbayev it's not you who would be doing the uploading. You'd share your Balloon with your wedding guests and they upload the photos they've taken of your wedding. Balloon is all about others sending you files directly with just a link
Hello Product Hunters!
Thank you for the amazing response.
Balloon is a drop box for your Dropbox. Share your Balloon to receive files, collect photos from an event, and so much more. Files go straight to your Dropbox and accessible on any device. No more signups and no more manual downloads. Jordan and I wanted something like this badly for ourselves to use and then we decided to make it open for all. Our core idea was to make sending and receiving files super simple and super easy to use.
The possibilities are endless.
A teacher could create a balloon for a particular assignment and share it with all the students. Something similar to balloon.io/Harvard/CS345/Assignment1
It is also a tool for anonymous file sharing. A company can create a feedback balloon and lets any customer share their feedback without having them signup/login.
Future updates :
Password protection.
Multiple cloud services.
Try it out and give us your feedback or any feature request :) Or you can send them privately to balloon.io/shiv too ;)
@ourielohayon@shivkanthb We only have read/write access to the files in your Balloon.io folder, not your entire Dropbox. We *could* read the files in your Balloon.io folder, but we don't :)
@jsngr@shivkanthb great. but how do i know you won't ? i just have to believe you? [sorry just trying to understand]
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I love the idea. The only problem is that the interface is not communicating sufficiently what's going on the screen / what should I do. E.g. I should drop files here, now I can go away because they were successfully uploaded and so on.
Great concept although I'd feel more secure with a random URL given to me I could share instead of creating a name someone else could guess. I don't know how I feel giving the world write access to my Dropbox.
@notrab Thank you Jamie :) We will be rolling out password protection for write access pretty soon. We have made creating and deleting balloons as easy as possible. So once you feel you have received your files, you can simple delete the balloon from your dashboard and the link will be no longer active for upload. Hope that helps :)
@notrab I agree with Jamie. I tried creating a folder called test something and it told me the folder name was taken. So i picked another one, but since i knew this other folder existed already, i just typed it into the url and uploaded .rtf describing how it got there. This should be controlled more so you dont idiots like me uploading random files to ppl's dropboxes. :)
Random hash names for the url would be a big help.
Great idea though! Love it :)
That's awesome, I love the simplicity. Would it be possible for guest to see what's in the balloon?
P.S.I encountered some issues with drag'n'drop on Safari9.0 (i had to click the balloon to upload file)
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