Dropzone is a Mac OS X app which sits in the menu bar and that allows you to configure a series of actions. You can add these actions in a grid that is shown whenever you drag something on top of the icon in the menu bar. Then you can drop files on these actions and upload the files to Dropbox, Flickr, Amazon S3 and others or just keep them until you need them later.
A month or so ago, I saw an article on Brett Terpstra’s blog about the new Dropzone 3 which was released on 1st of July. I remembered then that I got a license of Dropzone with one of the MacHeist bundles, but didn’t get me too interested because there weren’t too many actions (or destinations) and none of the existing ones were useful for me. Of course, I could’ve created one but I wasn’t that determined at that point (should read “too lazy to do it”).
Anyway, Brett’s review convinced me to give it another chance, especially that it could’ve also replaced another app I was using, Yoink. I had an idea of an action that I could develop with the Ruby API that Dropzone comes with. So I got an upgrade to my version 2 license and fired it up.
For a while I used it purely as a Yoink replacement and with some often used folders on the grid.
Because I upload all the images I put on this blog on Rackspace Cloud Files, it made sense to make an action for that. It would make things so much simpler! Just drag, drop and CDN URLs of the files are copied to clipboard!
It took a couple of weeks to get myself motivated to start it, especially because I never actually used Ruby to do anything concrete. But in the end was quite easy and fun!
After a couple of iterations I managed to get the action in a good shape with the help of John from Aptonic who was very quick to provide feedback. So there it is, go grab it from the actions page and let me know your feedback!