Have you tried the Google Chrome for Mac developer release? It’s missing just about every major feature you might expect in a browser (bookmarking, printing and Flash to name a few) but is still plenty awesome, and mostly on account of its incredible speed. It feels even snappier than Safari 4 which is also pretty quick.

As well as being fast at rendering pages, it also appears to start very quickly. When you first launch it, you’ll see what I mean. Many people have commented that the dock icon doesn’t even bounce once during launch. Here’s Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte discussing this unusual behavior on last weeks TWiT episode:

This behavior of zero dock icon bounces intrigued me as well, so I did some digging, and Kevin’s right, they did a hack. If we look in Chromes Info.plist we find the following:

The key I’ve highlighted tells OS X that Chrome is an agent application, that is, a background application that should not appear in the Dock or Force Quit window. That seems strange, as we know Chrome does appear in both.

Some more digging led me to this patch which tells us exactly what’s going on here.

So. Chrome is initially launched as a background app and then transformed into a foreground app using the Carbon API call TransformProcessType. This means that when Chrome starts, the dock icon doesn’t bounce because OS X doesn’t think it should have a dock icon. When TransformProcessType is called to give it back its dock icon Chrome is already fully loaded, the net result being that we never see the dock icon bounce.

What’s interesting is that the Chrome developers are actually doing this to workaround a completely unrelated issue involving the WebKit UI and it has even been filed as a bug. And to think we all thought they had done it deliberately to give the impression of a faster launch. Shame on us all.

Anyhow, I was interested in adding this behavior to Dropzone, as the Dropzone dock icon should ideally not bounce either as this is more in line with the behavior of the built in dock grids that Dropzone tries to mimic, also, the dock icon bounces would occasionally interfere with the positioning and display of the grid directly above it. Therefore, I have added this same code to Dropzone and made another improvement - if you click on the Dropzone dock icon when it’s closed, the grid is displayed immediately after launch. There is also another neat feature in Dropzone that you may not be aware of - if you drag something onto the dock icon when Dropzone is closed, it automatically launches and opens the grid. I have done a quick screencast that demos both of these behaviors:

As you can see, Dropzone launches so quickly you barely even notice that it was closed to begin with. Without this code, the Dropzone dock icon would always bounce once even though before it finished its first bounce, Dropzone was already launched.

So, while I’m certainly not recommending people start adding this code to their apps to provide the illusion of a faster launch, in the special case of Dropzone this is a nice touch.

It will also be interesting to see whether Google ends up sticking with this behavior in future releases of Chrome. I think since Chrome launches so quickly anyway they are best just to leave it as is. Also, I bet people will complain it now seems to start ’slower’ if they make it start bouncing again. Perception is everything.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

First it pauses iTunes if you happen to already be listening to something and then it launches the Last.fm client and automatically tunes into the similar artist station for the artist of the song you right clicked on.

This is an excellent way of discovering new artists similar to ones already in your iTunes library.

You can download a .dmg containing the plugin below, to install it simply drag the ‘iTunes Last.fm Plugin.plugin’ file contained in the disk image to your ‘/Library/Contextual Menu Items’ folder. Then relaunch iTunes and the plugin is installed.

	Download now

Update - I just added Growl support, so when you change stations it also sends a notification

The plugin has been tested on both PPC and Intel.

You must have the Last.fm client installed for the plugin to work. If you don’t already have it you can download it here

Complete source code for the plugin is available here
Licensed under the GPL.

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.