No worries, no skill required: it's only drag 'n drop and we like it.
We had some plus also: revisioning is something you're going to love if you manage bunches of files.
NOK
What we don't like in Dropbox is that everything is physically on someone else's server. Though we work a lot with VPS servers, so we do know that physical is no more the word on the Internet, still, we'd love to control things. At lease OUR things.
This is not what happens with third parties services. You subscribe them and you accept their EULA, which in plain english are Terms of Services, something we dare you, you won't ever read.
Of course we don't also like the fact that you need to pay to use such service. We do know that Open is not free, though we do prefer free as freedom and sometimes free as free beer. And we do love giving back to Open Source community, which is something we are actually into.
Old tools, new usage!
We got the chance to take a tour on AlternativeTo without finding anything satisfying for our needs, then we thought: what is something very familiar to us and it's basically the same concept? Subversion nicknamed SVN!
Right! But we realized also that SVN and their multiple clients are harder to us than Dropbox. All of them are much more focused on software development.
But we @nois3lab were in desperate need of a tool like Dropbox... So here comes BBox. An internal meant to be piece of software. But then we decided to give back to the community, so we immediately published the sources on Github.
Let's get some design love
The we came our specialty: the interface (our passion) is usable because is minimal, not to mention almost absent.
And we are lazy guys and girls, and we're not alone in this reign, we implemented an autocommit/autoshare system. What's that? You don't really want to be bothered clicking share each and every time you want to actually share something, right? So its main concept is: to be really effective BBox you need not to realize it's actually working. Your interface is your own file system.
This is a versioned file system, so it's natural that at some point you will have some version conflict: well revert the modifications or a certain specific version is fairly easy. Click on the notification icon and finding your suitable version in the logs, and just open it.
And yes, we also love free will, so you can disable autocommit.
Ok you cloned Dropbox... now what
This is not really much more than a Dropbox clone, honestly... But there are a couple of interesting things more than Dropbox.
Subversion grouping
Thus BBox is based on SVN technology, we can take advantage of all the SVN magic. So you can define groups (the interface for that is a little raw yet), and assign users to them, so if you don't have permissions to see a folder, you just won't ever see it.
One thing more: you can checkout a subfolder of the main versioned folder.
In our roadmap we also have the chance to get more than one SVN working, and a mobile app...
NERD NOTES
Some technical notes we want to add. Some of us is daily working on Qt libraries (yeah you spell it Cute), wanted to get BBox as an experimental field to test them out.
Because Qt are crossplatform libraries, we had for free - just compiling them of course - suitable versions for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux (under an Ubuntu/Debian package). Then what crossplatform means is literally everywhere: also mobile devices.
So yes we're already working on a very simple mobile application, which lets you see all the files in the repository, and lets you open a specific revision of a certain file, if the file is "known" to your device...
