Dropbox Announces Mailbox for Android and Desktop; Carousel ⇥ engadget.com

I’m an on-again-off-again Mailbox user; one of the reasons I’m currently using the default iOS Mail app is due to a lack of a Mac version. While the emphasis on “Inbox Zero” is a little irritating, I do enjoy the inbox-as-todo-list metaphor. For me, at least, this is usually the case.

Happily, there’s lots of big news from Dropbox today, kicking off with a version of Mailbox now available for Android, and a beta of the app for Mac. The Android app looks great (that article from Ellis Hamburger is chock full of great insidery stuff about Mailbox, too), while the Mac app is a beautiful complementary product. It might be enough to get me to switch back on iOS.

Also new in the entire Mailbox suite are a host of automation tools, which Ellis Hamburger smartly describes:

Let’s say you’re included in an office email chain welcoming a new employee. It’s probably the right thing to do to say hello to your new colleague, but at that point, who needs to see each and every reply? Most people would archive the thread, and then sigh as it returned to their inbox with each and every reply-all.

Automation tools like these tend to come from a very earnest intent, but often lack the sophistication and nuance of an actual human being. Therefore, they tend to replace the problems they solve with new ones. Given the intelligence of Dropbox and Mailbox, however, I’m optimistic.

Dropbox is also releasing an intriguing new app called Carousel, which is essentially a dedicated app for Dropbox’s existing Camera Roll feature. In a hilarious promo video, it appears that Dropbox intends for you to add all your photos to the app, including those from analog sources. I’m excited to see how that works.

After all this, it’s even more weird to me that Box is the online storage company currently going through the IPO process.