Cloud file syncing and sharing service Dropbox announced on April 20 that it will shut down Hackpad, a collaboration-friendly application for taking notes and even maintaining wikis, on July 19. It started telling users to export their files a few weeks ago, a Dropbox spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
Dropbox acquired Hackpad in 2014 and open-sourced the code in 2015.
But the discontinuation of the Hackpad web app is only happening after Dropbox introduced its Paper collaborative notetaking app and launched it out of beta.
So now, Dropbox will automatically migrate Hackpad documents to Dropbox Paper on July 19. But if you’re not comfortable with that, you can opt out. And you can export your files. There’s also an importing tool that Hackpad founder and Dropbox Paper lead Igor Kofman came up with that “helps convert your pads to Paper docs,” Kofman wrote in a message on the Hackpad homepage.
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“Paper takes many of Hackpad’s best features — like instant collaboration, comments, and real-time editing — and adds a lot more, including additional security features, faster search, and more visibility for teams,” Kofman wrote. The Dropbox spokesperson wouldn’t disclose the number of users of Hackpad or Paper but said people have made millions of documents in Paper. Dropbox Paper for Android has 100,000 downloads in the Google Play Store; Dropbox itself has more than 500 million registered users.
Other notetaking apps include Box Notes, Evernote, Google Keep, and Microsoft OneNote.
