Requesting feedback for Davros, a file storage app

[Michael Nutt]

Hello everyone,

I believe the app I've been building on and off for the past few months is finally ready. I'm posting it here in the hopes of gathering some feedback before I post it to the app marketplace. Any bug reports or suggestions are very much appreciated.

***Don't store important files in Davros yet, it may eat them***

Github Release URL: https://github.com/mnutt/davros/releases/tag/v0.10.6

Dogfood Release URL: https://mnutt.sandcats.io/shared/ga3vFSmGuJIsdrWD7RkzJpYAnWnbzpfT5fN9DYVkA06

Davros is a file storage platform for storing files and syncing between your devices. (a.k.a. "throw away your usb drive") It currently supports desktop sync clients on mac, linux, and windows, though while the latter two should work, they haven't been tested very much.

What it does:

* Synchronize files between devices using a desktop client.

* Upload, download and delete files from the web UI.

* Preview a few different file types in the web UI.

Known issues:

* Might be unhappy with syncing unicode characters

* Desktop client may report inaccurate usage/free disk space. (df issues)

* Previewing image aspect ratios can be wonky sometimes. (flexbox is hard)

Todo:

* No mobile support, yet

* Can't move or rename any files through the web UI.

* Web publishing a directory

Davros is not a port but was built specifically for Sandstorm. Some interesting things I found along the way:

* Davros uses Ember for its frontend, and I ended up coding up an ember addon called 'ember-cli-vagrant-spk' that hooks into ember's build pipeline and reloads spk whenever I save a file: https://github.com/mnutt/ember-cli-vagrant-spk

* Likewise, I ended up with a nice ember component for {{offer-template template="Your key is $API_KEY"}} to show API keys, and automatic Sandstorm URL updating from the ember router.

I think I have had questions answered by at least half of the sandstorm team at this point. Thanks, everyone!

Cheers,

Michael

[Jake Weisz]

I am pretty sad about the Google-branded design, but in particular would it be possible to get some sort of condensed view? All of the text in the app appears somewhere around the size of a page heading to me. And the alternating greys in the file list is a bit too subtle. It's hard to see on my screens.

FYI, I know there's bugs in the storage reporting, I just wanted to say it was terrifying telling the oC client I was okay with it downloading 43 GB of stuff onto my PC from an empty grain. I'm genuinely curious if that's some sort of weird data leak of the server's storage usage or what.

The app functions pretty smoothly, and I had no difficulty getting it to work with the ownCloud client, which was pretty cool. Overall a great alternative to FileDrop (also Google-branded design :/ seems unescapable at the moment), as I imagine a lot of people will want to store files on Sandstorm, and we went way too long without any options at all. Now we have two!

Also, I just found a Sandstorm bug. *runs off to file it*

-Jacob Weisz

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[Michael Nutt]

> On Nov 2, 2015, at 1:44 AM, Jake Weisz <jtn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am pretty sad about the Google-branded design, but in particular would it be possible to get some sort of condensed view? All of the text in the app appears somewhere around the size of a page heading to me. And the alternating greys in the file list is a bit too subtle. It's hard to see on my screens.

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it “Google-branded”, but I can see where you’re coming from. I started with Material to get it off the ground quickly; I expect it’ll diverge over time. I’ll bump up the contrast on the zebra stripes.

> FYI, I know there's bugs in the storage reporting, I just wanted to say it was terrifying telling the oC client I was okay with it downloading 43 GB of stuff onto my PC from an empty grain. I'm genuinely curious if that's some sort of weird data leak of the server's storage usage or what.

Yeah, I agree that’s terrifying. Davros was reporting total disk space used on the drive and the client was displaying it as usage within the grain. I released v0.10.7 which should hopefully fix that. There’s still a bug lurking somewhere in there, but it shouldn’t report egregiously wrong numbers now.

> The app functions pretty smoothly, and I had no difficulty getting it to work with the ownCloud client, which was pretty cool. Overall a great alternative to FileDrop (also Google-branded design :/ seems unescapable at the moment), as I imagine a lot of people will want to store files on Sandstorm, and we went way too long without any options at all. Now we have two!

I’m really excited about powerbox coming out, from the standpoint of data portability. Sandstorm lets you own your data, but for many use cases the data is still most accessible if it’s on the user’s hard drive. I imagine tons of apps would benefit from “export” functionality, and it would be awesome for Davros / FileDrop / others to all expose “export file” through Powerbox. I’d love to start adding support for this as soon as Powerbox is ready.

Michael

[Jake Weisz]

I am curious if a grain/app's ability to find out the server's free space is a info leak concern that the Sandstorm team should look at. I'm not sure if there's anything particularly damaging you can do with that info, but it seems like info users of your server shouldn't have.

-Jacob Weisz

[Michael Nutt]

I talked about it a bit on IRC the other day with dwrensha; it may be good to deny the grain the ability to discover the size / usage of the underlying disk, but it would also be good to let the user know how much space they’re allowed to use.

!DSPAM:563793d1258481498915381!