Which one is the original? [Min.us vs Dropmocks ]

Recently I wrote about Min.us, a minimalistic photo gallery application, which allows you to upload and share your photographs easily. Its been making the rounds these days that Min.us is hugely 'inspired' by Google's Dropmocks. Min.us is designed by John Xie and Carl Hu, while DropMocks comes from Glen Murphy of Chrome team. If you visit the two sites, one is easily fooled to believe they are the same site with probably two different URLs! Keeping that in mind, it would be incorrect to discredit Min.us entirely.

Recently I wrote about Min.us, a minimalistic photo gallery application, which allows you to upload and share your photographs easily. Its been making the rounds these days that Min.us is hugely ‘inspired’ by Google’s Dropmocks.

Min.us is designed by John Xie and Carl Hu, while DropMocks comes from Glen Murphy of Chrome team. If you visit the two sites, one is easily fooled to believe they are the same site with probably two different URLs! Keeping that in mind, it would be incorrect to discredit Min.us entirely.

Here are screenshots of a gallery I created on both these applications.

DropMocks Gallery.
Min.us Gallery

While the layout and design is starkly similar to DropMocks, it does have features which stand out.

Why Min.us over DropMocks?

  • Upload Capacity: Min.us wins with 7MB limit per image while DropMocks has a mere 900KB limit.
  • Login: Neither of the sites requires an account to upload images. However, DropMocks allows you to login with your Google account as compared to Minus where you have to sign up for one. One positive for DropMocks.
  • Browser Support: DropMocks is not supported by Safari so Min.us wins as its supported by Safari on Mac.
  • Bulk Download: Min.us, unlike DropMocks, allows viewers to download all the images within a gallery in a zip file.
  • Gallery Editing: Min.us generates an ‘Edit’ URL, which when shared with viewers allows them to add or delete images from your gallery.

Though the user interface is very similar, Min.us wins this round with more user-friendly features. Personally though, I’m disappointed with the stark similarity of interface. While everyone is still guessing who copied whose design, what matters is which one people use. From the functionality perspective Min.us seems to come out as the clear winner. What do you think? Which one would you rather use? Let me know your views through your comments.

Links: Minus, DropMocks

9 Comments

John November 25, 2010

Hi

Minus was inspired by Dropmocks to create a universal sharing platform for files and not just images, even though images is a start. It is built on the opensource code of dropmocks with the backend completely custom written and deployed on Amazon EC2 + S3 Cloud. At this point however the frontend code is also different with many new features and many more to come.

Cheers
John

Shradha Rao November 25, 2010

Hi John,
As I’ve mentioned, I’m pro-Minus. Its definitely got strong, distinguishing features as compared to DropMocks. As an user though, one is bound to notice the similarity especially if it is on the ground of layout or design. Wishing you luck with Min.us ahead.
Best
Shradha

John November 26, 2010

Thank you Shradha. We’re definitely doing everything we can to add new features for our users and also contribute to the opensource dropmocks project in the near future!

John

Debajyoti Das November 25, 2010

The best thing for me about min.us is that gives direct links to the image. So we can embed it easily in webpages etc.

Shradha Rao November 26, 2010

I agree with you! Though for me, its got to be the simplicity of drag and drop!

Ile January 21, 2011

Min.us didn’t give any credit to DropMocks which is just wrong.

Shradha January 21, 2011

Exactly my point as well! The internet is all about improvising and moving on, but not paying your dues is not ethical.

Shane February 19, 2011

Yes they did. Maybe not on the front page directly (because they want to keep the main interface clean), but if you click the About at the bottom, they mention is was inspired by Glen Murphy’s design.

http://min.us/pages/about

Ile February 25, 2011

Yes, they probably did give credit originally. There was some confusion about it (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/eailg/minus_code_was_taken_from_an_open_source_version). Ok, well, just a little bit of interesting drama I thought, maybe I was wrong.