What do you do if you love Dropbox but hate the Dropbox app?
Anyone that works mobile or from different locations will know how useful Dropbox is. This (largely) free service provides a central store for your documents which can be synched to any device running the Dropbox client – such as your Mac, PC, iPad, or iPhone. Folders can also be made accessible to others so you can easily share files and work collaboratively on documents.
The standard iOS Dropbox app is perfectly usable, but does have a few practical limitations; you can’t rename a document, for example, or un-delete files that someone else might have inadvertently removed. 
Boxie is an app designed to improve your Dropbox experience. It opens as a standalone app, and requires a link to your Dropbox account. The sleek, if slightly dowdy monochrome interface provides access to all your Dropbox folders and content, with gestural access to functions. Swipe right to left to delete an object, or swipe left to right to bring up a menu with which you can bookmark a file for quick access, save it for viewing when you’re offline, rename it, and share it. The latter option lets you send links via Messages, Mail, Twitter and Facebook, with direct links to other Boxie users via Messages and Mail. 
The Dropbox app has a few similar functions (share, rename, delete), but Boxie presents it all in a much neater, more logical fashion. Also, moving files and folders around is done via drag and drop, which again is faster and slicker than using the Dropbox app’s menus.
Unexpected activity
Other niceties include the ability to receive notifications regarding activity in your Dropbox folder, so you can see what files are being accessed by others. And if someone inadvertently moves or changes a file, you can go back to earlier versioned files, which is a really useful feature (and potential life-saver!). You can also copy, rename and paste a file, making a back-up so you can work on the original. 
Boxie lets you view most documents, including PDFs, Word and Pages documents (although the new version of Pages saves its files as a package which means you can’t view the content properly). It also has a built-in video player and will happily display most image formats, including PNGs with an alpha channel, and animated GIFs. But Photoshop PSDs still aren’t supported, and there’s no link to open them in Photoshop Touch. Admittedly PSDs can be quite large, but as the world’s most popular image editing format it’s still annoying that there’s no support, even for viewing a preview. There’s no automatic camera uploads from Dropbox, either, but Tapwings says this is coming in a future update. 
If you’re a Dropbox power user, Boxie will definitely justify its place on your Home Screen. It may not seem that amazing at first, but over time we’re sure you’ll see the benefit of features like renaming and duplicating files, restoring deleted files, and its general ease of use. However, for an app that promises to ‘prettify your Dropbox experience’, it’s actually not that pretty – a dash of (user-definable) color, wouldn’t go amiss
Price: $2.99/£1.99
Size: 8.2 MB
Version: 1.1.0
Platform: iOS Universal
Developer: Tapwings