Ship Some Code

I just released Dropzone over at Aptonic.

Go download it if you haven’t already, and if you like it, support the project by buying a copy - As promised, it’s only $10.

I’m really very proud of it, and have come to depend on it in my day to day work. Although it can take a while before it feels a natural part of your OS X workflow, once you ‘get it’ it becomes an indispensable utility, a lot like Quicksilver or TextExpander.

I see this as just a beginning, and I hope you’ll help me build on it using the Dropzone scripting API. Some pretty neat stuff has already been built. I also need your feedback on how to evolve the API to make it even more useful.

There are many more features I am working on for future releases, such as SFTP, WebDAV and MobileMe support. So if you need these, rest assured they are coming soon.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy using the app and let me know what you think of it!

A friend of a friend on twitter did this gorgeous new application icon. What’s really cool is that the icon has two different states, one for when the portal is inactive and another ON state for when you’re teleporting things.

Let me know what you think in the comments or on twitter. And then cake will be served.

Its been a while since I’ve said anything about Dropzone progress.

Rest assured, the app is coming along extremely well and will now launch in late May.
The feedback I’ve had from the beta testers has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve been working through their bugs.

As so often happens with software, the scope of the project has expanded somewhat.

As well as being the ’swiss army knife of drag & drop for the Mac’ as one beta tester dubbed the app, I’m also adding the ability to use the grid as a launcher for your scripts or applications.

I’ve posted a screencast over at http://aptonic.com/ to demo some of the uses for the app. Check it out.

Update: Thanks to TUAW I now have enough beta testers to invade a small country with. Thanks everyone. Looking forward to getting some more feedback!

Dropzone is shaping up to be a pretty neat tool.

The foundation of the app is complete, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done on the file transfer methods and scripting system so in order to allow some more time to make these parts awesome, I am delaying the release until around the end of this month.

I posted the shiny new application icon above. Let me know what you think.

Also, If you would like to be emailed when Dropzone launches, stick your email address in the box below.

I’ve been hard at work on Dropzone and the concept is starting to come together now. I have posted a 30 second screencast to show off the new interface here - check it out.

A new icon is being has been developed for Dropzone - the icon shown in the screencast is the old one Dockdrop used.

Happy holidays!

After taking a long break from Mac development while I finished off a Ruby on Rails project, I am finally back into Cocoa.

If you use Dockdrop regularly then you would have noticed the recent Sparkle update come down. This update further improves the Dockdrop interface and fixes a bunch of other bugs.

Other than bugfixes, it is unlikely many new features will be added to Dockdrop as I am currently busy developing the new and improved version of Dockdrop which will be called ‘Dropzone’

Dropzone will support multiple accounts, allow uploading of multiple files at once and have a neat new interface that I’m really looking forward to showing off.

The ship date for Dropzone that I’m aiming for is the 10th of February.
It will go on sale then at US $10 a copy.

If you have enjoyed using Dockdrop then I’d love it if you’d support the project by purchasing a copy.

Dockdrop will continue to be free and will still be supported with bugfixes and updates.

If you are interested in doing some beta testing on Dropzone please drop me an email.

Thanks for all the emails and support over the past year!

I just pushed out Dockdrop 1.5.2 via Sparkle.

New in this version

• Major user interface improvements
• Files are now time stamped if you upload multiple files with the same name
• Option added in the preferences so you can choose to have Dockdrop put the direct Flickr URL on the clipboard
• Cancel transfer now deletes partially uploaded files
• Upload selection and upload progress floating window now shows in all spaces
• Memory leaks fixed
• Underlying file transfer framework updated
• Fixed crash when canceling WebDAV transfers on 10.4

You can also download Dockdrop 1.5.2 here

Have fun and let me know if you come across any bugs.

It’s finally here. This version features:

• A much nicer icon
• Sparkle automatic updating
• A dock menu with the 10 most recently uploaded items so you can re-copy URLS to the clipboard
• Auto-close after an upload finishes, so Dockdrop is only open when it’s actually doing something
• Hot key uploading - this lets you choose a shortcut to use to trigger an upload of the selected item from the Finder, iTunes or iPhoto
• SCP public key support
• The upload progress window can now be moved anywhere on the screen and its position is saved
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

You can download a copy here or from the Dockdrop website

Enjoy the new release and let me know how you like it in the comments.

I am so sick of GrowlTunes. When it tries to find album art for a song that doesn’t have an ‘Album’ tag set it goes ahead and queries Amazon for the album art anyway, this results in a terribly ugly looking ‘Unter Null’ picture displaying in the Growl notification, presumably because it is querying Amazon for ‘Null’.

I tried downloading a fresh version from the Growl site and the version available currently (1.1.2) doesn’t seem to suffer the ugliness and instead displays a much more sensible iTunes icon.

Great, I thought. That’s the end of my troubles with GrowlTunes.

Not so.

It seems that this version has a new problem - if a song is played that has no ‘Track Number’ field set then GrowlTunes displays an ugly (null). where the track name should appear.

At this point I’m more than a little peeved. Would it really have killed them to add a simple check to see if the Track Number is null and if so, don’t try and display it. This is an application used by hundreds of thousands of people, I just can’t understand it. Mac software is meant to be built better than this.

A quick Google search shows I am not the only one complaining about this problem and the standard reply seems to be that a replacement version of GrowlTunes is currently being developed and we are meant to wait for that to fix the stupidness.

Since the source for GrowlTunes is freely available I figured I’d download it and fix it. It only took me 10 minutes and 2 lines of code to make it only try and display the track number if a track number is actually set. You can download the version I have fixed here.

Close your current version of GrowlTunes, unzip my one, drag it to your applications folder and replace the existing version. From now on GrowlTunes will only try and display a track number if there is one available to display.

First of all, Matthew Harper has posted a blog entry on configuring Dockdrop to work with .Mac.

Secondly, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and feature requests on this version of Dockdrop. I’m still figuring out which features I’d like to include in the next release, but so far it’s looking like:

• The ability to upload an entire folder of pictures to Flickr
• Add an option somewhere to close Dockdrop after an upload completes
• Needs to prompt before overwriting already existing files or mark subsequent file uploads with a time stamp
• Possibly the ability to setup multiple FTP or SCP sites, although this will require some significant changes to the configuration panel
• Some basic Applescript support for specifying an upload method etc.
• The ability to assign a hot key to trigger an upload on a file selected in the Finder
• Several minor bug fixes

Thanks for all the comments and feedback. I will post to the blog when I release the next version.