Ship Some Code

After 4 months in beta, Frenzy 1.0 is finally released.

I’d like to to talk a little about the motivation behind Frenzy and show off a few tricks that haven’t been discussed elsewhere.

When Dropbox came out, it made sharing files and folders with your friends effortless. You can just put stuff in a folder and then you know that at some point the same stuff will turn up in your friends folder. It’s also private, so no one but the people you choose are able to see the contents of that folder.

The problem is, Dropbox lacks some of the more social aspects to sharing with each other. In a lot of cases, sending someone a file also needs an explanation to go along with it, and it would also be nice if the recipient could reply directly about what was shared. Of course you could do this bit by email, but it would be much nicer to be able to write a message to go right along with the thing you shared.

Frenzy lets you do just this. You simply drag a file or folder onto the menu item and Frenzy pops up and asks you which groups of people you want to share with.

Lets see a real world example of this:

Say I have some design sketches I want to get feedback on. First I drag the folder onto the Frenzy menu item:

The main Frenzy window pops up and asks which groups I want to share it with. Groups are simply the Dropbox shared folders that I have setup. You can invite new people to a shared folder or remove someone via the Dropbox web interface.

You can have multiple people in each group, or just one person as in my ‘Jason’ group. In this case, I select the Design group. I press enter or click share and the folder is copied to the Dropbox folder for syncing and my item is added to the feed:

My friends will now see the item I shared in their feeds.

When I receive replies, the number of new messages will be shown in red on the Frenzy menu item:

But Frenzy isn’t just for sharing and discussing files and folders. You can also share links with Frenzy.

To share a link, goto a site in your favorite browser and then use the Frenzy keyboard shortcut. The default is Control+Option+S. You can customize this shortcut in the Frenzy preferences.

You can also use the keyboard shortcut to reply to links already shared in the timeline.

For example, if Karen shares a link with me, I can click on the link and it opens in my browser. Now I can use the keyboard shortcut and Frenzy detects this item has already been shared so it will treat this as a reply:

Alternatively, I can click in the area indicated above to re-share this link with a different group. If I want to re-share this link with the family group for example:

Frenzy is available for download now from http://frenzyapp.com as a full featured 15 day trial. For a limited time it is $10USD to buy. Watch the screencast and give it a try.

There is also a getting started guide here to help you get setup.

The first 100 Frenzy customers get 20% off. Use the coupon code FIRST100 when checking out.

Many app updates are coming, in the meantime if you have questions let me know in the comments or email support@aptonic.com

Frenzy has been progressing, not as fast as I would have liked but it’s getting there. I personally use the app with my friends like crazy and love it which is a good sign.

I contracted the mad design skills of Adrian Kenny to do this gorgeous looking icon for the app.

It’s not totally finished yet but here is a preview:

I am still uncertain about what the Avatars should be saying.

The current banter is really just a placeholder until I think of something better - Ideally the length of the text for each Avatar would be similar and contain the perfect amount of wit.

Please let me know if you have ideas.

Oh Gee. It has been forever since I blogged on here. Is anyone still listening?

First thing:

Someone emailed me recently to ask how Dropzone tracks the dock icon and how can they do something similar with their own Cocoa app.

My reply is below:

You can poll the accessibility API to query the position of the dock element and then set the window frame to this frame.

This app is invaluable for figuring out the correct accessibility element.

This class will help with the accessibility stuff.

I warn you though, once you start down the road of doing horrible hacks like this there is no turning back and you will need 100s more hacks to maintain the initial hack. It took me months of hard work to make the dock tracking system work well and it still has to use a separate process and constantly takes up CPU to poll the API as there is no notification for when the dock tile size changes.

I STRONGLY urge you to find another way to do whatever you are trying to do that does not require a window over the dock icon.

It got me thinking how clever I thought I was when got the dock tracking system Dropzone uses working. It’s a horribly complicated system involving all kinds of hacks and workarounds, all to give me dragging notifications on the dock icon so I could show the grid of actions. This is something Apple never intended apps in the dock to be able to do.

One example of the kinds of extra hacks it leads to is that if you hit F11 it shifts the hidden window off screen, and dock dragging no longer works. This is annoying for a user if they want to expose the desktop and then drag something onto Dropzone. I can get around this by recreating the window when a show desktop is detected, but then I need a way to detect show desktop activation and there is no API for this either…

If you’re thinking of making an app that does hacks like Dropzone, change your mind and don’t. It leads to inflexible and unmaintainable code that is subject to break at any moment.

Compare Dropzone with more standard, single windowed apps like Things and NetNewsWire. I don’t think they have an easy job either, but at least they aren’t trying to interface with integral parts of OS X like the dock where there is no API and things are liable to break next OS update. It’s fun and novel to break all the rules, but in the end, you won’t feel so great about your app. Trust me. Been there.

Second thing:

People have been asking me if I’ve given up on Dropzone. No I haven’t give up and I’m still selling a few licenses a day which I’m really thrilled about. Thank you all.

Part of the reason I haven’t updated Dropzone in a while is that it’s already doing everything I need.

The other reason is that I’m hard at work developing a new app! This will be a slightly more conventional app than Dropzone - It’s a private social network for sharing links, messages and files using Dropbox as the backend. It’s in still in alpha at the moment, but it’s coming along well and I’m hoping to do a big open beta in month or so to get feedback from a wider audience.

The new app is called Frenzy and its hosted at frenzyapp.com. I have posted a screenshot of the app there. Check it out.

Third thing:

An awesome song and video by a great New Zealand artist. Also… Broken Machine… get it?

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.