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!

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.

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.

After several months of hard development, I’ve finally released Dockdrop. You can find out more about it and grab a copy at http://dockdropx.com

There are many more features I plan on adding including support for even more protocols, Quicksilver integration, Adium/iChat/Mail integration and a whole bunch of other stuff that will have to wait for future releases.

Meanwhile, enjoy version 1 and let me know what you think of it.

I just released MythGrowl 0.4.2. Those who downloaded what turned out to be Intel only 0.4.1 can do a Check for updates… and will be updated via Sparkle.

This version now properly supports PPC machines, but will not run on any OS X versions earlier than 10.4 and there are no plans at this stage to support earlier versions.

If you haven’t downloaded MythGrowl yet, or are a PPC user then go grab the shiny new universal binary here

For non PPC users, the update won’t mean a whole lot, it does update the icon and enabling some build optimization options has slightly reduced the size of the binary though.

Many thanks to Mike Daley for his help building making this release work under PPC as well as Intel.

For those of you watching the blog for a new release of MythGrowl, it’s finally here. I have moved the project to Sourceforge, got it a website, checked the code into SVN etc.

The new version has Sparkle support and some new features you will hopefully like. I could go on about how great I think the new version is but the easiest thing is probably just for you to head over to:

http://mythgrowl.sourceforge.net

Download it, and try it for yourself. The site also has details on obtaining the source code, reporting bugs etc.

Major credits goto Paul William for thinking up great new ideas for features to add to improve MythGrowl.

A number of people have emailed me and said that my so called universal binary doesn’t actually work on PPC Macs. I am looking into this and will hopefully release a version shortly that works on both PPC and Intel.

Have fun!

I found a couple of problems with MythGrowl, it would often crash after being run for more that 3 hours due to some very hard to debug multi-threading problems. I have it all sorted now, so if you downloaded and were running MythGrowl 0.1 or 0.2 be sure to upgrade and run 0.3 which is available at the same download link as before in the post below.

For those interested, I was using the curl library for Cocoa to retrieve the Mythbackend status page in its own thread. Turns out the use of libcurl was totally unnecessary as versions of MAC OS X greater than 10.2 support the NSURLConnection API which provides a much more clean and simple way to retrieve data from a URL. So I have also been able to reduce the size of the application and source by removing the threading library I was using and eliminating libcurl.

Overall a very satisfactory fix.

I’ve just finished writing MythGrowl - a fairly simple MAC OS X application that generates Growl notifications when your MythTV backend starts and stops recording or watching a show. You simply specify the IP address or hostname of your MythTV backend server and it will start notifying you. The application (universal binary) is available below.

Update: This is no longer the place to download MythGrowl. It has moved to http://mythgrowl.sourceforge.net/ Download the latest version there!

	Download now

Complete source code can be downloaded here
I’m releasing MythGrowl under the GPL.

You have to promise to check for regular updates and report any bugs. I plan to implement the Sparkle update system in the next release.

Screenshots: