We’ve just let the second installment of the Bikini Monkey series out of the cage! There’s lots of nice new features for you to get your teeth into. Unfortunately though, we don’t have time for a big long descriptive post as we’re presenting Dropr at the OFFF festival today in Barcelona and we’re madly limited on time:).

So, in short:

• New portfolios. We’ve made some big and important changes. Now they’re cleaner and more attractive than ever. The music player is improved with different play modes including the ability to ‘play’ an entire portfolio.
• Stats. Now you can view loads of different stats on your portfolios popularity around the network. Pssst… our charts are mountains!
• Imports. If you already have an account on Behance, Carbonmade, Flickr or a load of other sites, now you can import your work from them to us in just a few clicks. We’re making life a bit easier by helping you with your luggage.
• Improved Explore. We’ve tried to make explore more useful by improving the relevancy of searches and by adding different filtering settings.
• General redesign and a whole lot more. The general look and feel of the site has changed as have many pages in general. Very few areas of the site haven’t benefited from a bit of a revamp or rethink.

Please let us know what you think, and as ever let us know if you find any bugs!

Love!

Dropr Crew

The good evening

We recently hooked up with the great guys at London/Paris based collective Praveenata who also seem to think bringing creative people together could do some good to this somewhat troubled world :)

Praveenata Collective was created in September 2011 and has two combined objectives: promoting young artists from around the world by gathering them during multi media exhibitions, and raising awareness and funds for the Himalayan Farm Project (HFP) which is a not for profit school of sustainable living in the Himalayas, India.

In our events you will see the work of artists on all the new media tools that exist today, without forgetting about the old traditional art. One can go with the other one. You will never have artists from the same country exhibited at once. This way, we intend to show that this movement is general. The event is based on the sharing and is aiming at integrating all generations.

They’re throwing a creative evening / exhibition in London, on Friday 20th of April (yep, this week).

Entrance costs £4, and all the money raised will go to the Himalayan Farm Project, an experiment on sustainable living based in north India.

The Praveenata *2 event will feature:

• Collages by Lucian Harbădă and Vlad Neuman
• Audio visual by Georgio Oniani and Unconnue
• Interactive wall installation by Matt Cyrankiewicz
• Photography by Roberto Cifuentes
• Sculpture by Hugo Cantegrel
• Painting by Daphne Kaltsou
• Prints by Dalini Sadavega
• Music live act by Molia

In other words a great mixture of media and backgrounds.

If you happen to be around London this Friday and have at least a moment to spare and say hello, come join us at:

4 Eagle House, 30 Eagle Wharf Road, N1 7EH, London

5pm – 12am

It’s the second event in a series and each becomes bigger, so you might hear about them soon again.

“Our Thoughts Are To The Individual As Our Art Is To The Community.” Wendel Pierce

From other news:

We’ve just released our media manager, a pretty awesome way to organize, upload and control all the creative bits you have online. It’s not only quite a looker, but it’s pretty powerful too.

Some features:

• All media equal
  We don’t charge differently for different media, there are no more ‘dropees’ for your uploads, all you use when uploading now are.. well, your uploads. Every piece you add uses just one upload, no matter whether it’s an image, audio tune or video.
• All media together
  You don’t need to select which type of media you want to upload, just drop a file and Dropr will know what to do about it. You can upload a lot of new file types too, including text, and zip, because…
• HTML5 can be art too
  Dropr is the first platform to host HTML5/JavaScript interactive projects. Just drop a ZIP file with your piece of algorithmic (for example!) art.
• Drag and drop everything
  Drop files from your system, as many as you want at once, don’t worry about file types. After you add your pieces, you can drag them around too, to sort, move between projects or move projects between galleries. It’s nice and smooth, like probably never before on the web.
• And more
  There are quite many othere new things, like custom editing project and piece thumbs.
• And even much more of more
  We have also updated the site with a lot of new small things and fixes. We’ve fixed all the bugs reported by droprs too (thanks!)

So here it is: the content manager for all your creative stuff online. Our early Christmas gift.

(on that note, I’d like to apologize for the serious lack of cool images in this post, but we’re working on a couple of other big nice things and there was no time)

And that’s not all of the gifts. All of our good Cloudmasters get +10 uploads today so that they can test the new manager for free.
As always, please report all problems so we can fix them soon!

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One thing for sure, this Christmas, dropping will feel like never before.

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Thanks!

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PS for those hackers: With this update we are beginning to open source bits of Dropr. You can find our new awesome crossbrowser content uploader class called ‘DropZone’ on GitHub. Feel free to use and contribute (MIT licence)!

Thanks again, Dropr crew

Thanks for all the feedback through our survey, guys!

First of all, we were actually surprised by the amount of positive feedback we’ve got from you – I mean, we know that Dropr is a nice app with a great community, but over past months we’ve found a heck of a lot of things that could be improved and it’s probably not as amazing as it should be – now, that’s going to change!

Not all the feedback was sweet of course – and that’s great, because it has given us something to aim for with the new version. We’ve got a couple of nice ideas from you that will be implemented into the new version too. I would like to thank you for the time you’ve given us (some of you have written multiple pages of text!). Thank you!

We’ve closed the survey about 2 weeks ago and there’s a serious reason for it – the new version is heavily under development :)

Because of the amount of changes, we have decided to divide development into 2 stages (and code-named the release “Bikini Monkey”, this is subject to change though):

Dropr Bikini Monkey Mark I (coming this Spring ekhem, Summer)

We’ve decided to redesign the whole Dropr. Some sentiment aside, it was time for a major re-think of what we’ve been offering to you. The new Dropr is going to be much simpler, much easier, a little bit more conventional where you’d expect it and pretty innovative where it makes sense. It’s going to be a bit of a stretch to call the thing just a website.

Some highlights:

• Less interface! (& We’re removing some functionality that’s not essential in your and our opinion)
• Mobile, tablet and weird-resolution friendly
• Completely rewritten code in the front and in the back
• Much more speed
• Brand new (and instant!) exploring
• New dashboard to keep your updates nicely organized
• Updated portfolios: A little less functionality, even more focus on content, better design
• New account types
• Multi-portolio management (Stage 1)
• and such

Dropr Bikini Monkey Mark II (this Summer Autumn)

This release will bring a very new portfolio manager and some big new features.

Highlights:

• Better content management
• Groups to chat about stuff and share some stuff too
• Tentacles (Dropr API that rocks!)
• i18n ( in other words: Dropr en muchos tongues!)
• A new account type
• and more

Release of the Stage 2 will be equal to what others would call 1.0 RC, which means Dropr might mature quite soon!

We’ll share some more info and perhaps a few screenshots soon.

Love!
Dropr Crew

There’s a new (& awesome!) version of Dropr coming in the not too distant future and we’re looking for you good people to let us know what you would love to see in there.

We’ve created a wee survey for you: dropr.com/wtf

Be honest – this is your chance to make your mark on what Dropr is!

Cheers