I was for­tu­nate enough to get invit­ed by Aaron Levie to test Box.net’s “Ear­ly Adap­tor Pre­view” this past week­end. I could­n’t blurt any­thing till after the 22nd about it. But yah, I almost for­got as I’ve been busy enjoy­ing my Mon­day off from work.

Any­ways, so far so good. Here’s a cou­ple of my find­ings from the get­go:

• Sooth­ing and attrac­tive col­or palette
• UI upgrad­ed to be 2.0‑friendly
• Right-click (after log­ging in) pops up a Box.net menu. A dis­ad­van­tage I guess, at least for me. Your browser’s right-click menu options won’t work. For exam­ple, Screen­grab FF exten­sion to take a cou­ple of screen­shots. Note: I men­tioned this to Aaron, he said that they might give an option to have it enabled/disabled lat­er on.
• Upload­ing. At first, I thought the Upload-tab was going to change the actu­al page (com­ing from the Browse-sec­tion). It actu­al­ly just pops up a lay­er onto the view­port with its con­tent. If you are com­ing from any­where else oth­er than the Browse-sec­tion and clicked on Upload-tab, you are actu­al­ly redi­rect­ed to the Browse-sec­tion first and need to click on Upload-tab again to do the actu­al upoad. Note: As Aaron point­ed out through email, this is more of a “usabil­i­ty” thing and should be addressed lat­er on.

  Sec­ond, I thought the “drag-and-drop” was actu­al­ly func­tion­al so I test­ed an image file and dragged it to the brows­er win­dow, only to be greet­ed by the pre­view of the image itself. That is, the brows­er chang­ing its URL to the local files. “Oops.” Did­n’t know the “drag-and-drop” text was a link which pops up a win­dow (Java applet) for the actu­al drag-and-drop.

  Besides the above, I found that rel­a­tive­ly easy and intu­itive to upload your files. Grant­ed it ain’t there ain’t no Win­dows file-trans­fer ani­ma­tion, but its direct to the point—to get your files as fast and as safe as pos­si­ble from your hard-dri­ve to their server(s).

I’ll post some screen­shots lat­er today. It’s so pur­ty believe me. As for now, you may get a glimpse through this Box.net shared-fold­er, or via Box.net’s blog entry about the relaunch.

Note: Here are some pod­cast inter­views with Aaron Levie: a) by Gear Live, and b) Ven­tu­rus.