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Berokyo Creates Bookshelves for Anything, Including Dropbox

Desktop organizer and quick launcher Berokyo has been around on the Mac and Windows for quite some time now. On the desktop, the app allows you to organize, sort and manage your most used files and folders for quick access and media consumption. The developers recently released a universal iOS version of the app, which like the Mac counterpart puts the focus on letting users visually organize their documents on a virtual bookshelf; unlike the desktop, though, iOS devices don’t have the possibility to display a file system. The developers thus had to rethink the whole approach of Berokyo, changing the way users get files into the app. Berokyo for iOS can create unlimited bookshelves for documents coming from other apps on your iPhone and iPads (like Pages and Numbers) but, most of all, can sync with Dropbox.

While testing the app, I found the Dropbox integration really useful: once authorized with your account credentials, Berokyo will create a Dropbox bookshelf that’s entirely customizable in the way it displays files and folders, extensions and file names. You can adjust grid spacing and show thumbnails, change the bookshelf’s background. To navigate between folders, you have to tap on the thumbnail and then on an arrow button in the upper left corner to get back to the previous level. A little unintuitive at first, mostly because the arrow button doesn’t look like an iOS “back” action at all. You can search within a bookshelf and sub-folders, add new folders or files from your Camera Roll or iTunes. Berokyo can preview images, PDFs, plain text files, contact’s details – almost anything, really. Files that can’t be previewed in-app support the “Open In…” iOS feature.

Think of Berokyo as a “visual aggregator” for files you have on your device already, or on Dropbox. It can open and preview these files, send them to other apps or via email. It’s an organizer that tries to make the sorting process easier and more visual with the use of bookshelves, something that iOS and OS X users should be used to. Several file types are supported, and rarely I found myself in the situation where I couldn’t do anything with a document imported into Berokyo. If you’re looking for such a way to get all the files on your iOS device into a single place, the app is $2.99 in the App Store.

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