Beta Beat: Dropzone for Mac OS X

That's great news. You have to tell me about Ruby on OS X, too. I would have liked to go, too.

Hi Guys - Dropzone creator here. I had a good laugh reading some of those comments. Let me explain a few things:

Dropzone allows you to setup 'destinations' (each icon in the grid is a destination). You can then drag files, folders, text or whatever onto a destination and then that gets passed to a ruby or bash script for processing (called a 'destination script'). A destination script can do anything you could imagine, upload files, save text to a file or resize an image. You can also share destination scripts with others so they can extend Dropzone.

Several destination scripts will ship with Dropzone, currently these are:

-Open with application (this lets you open dragged files with a specified application, similar to Overflow)

-Move files to a specified folder

-Zip & Email (zip up files or folders and add them as an attachment to Mail.app)

-Pastie (send text to the pastie.org service)

-Install an application (copies the dragged application to your applications folder, runs it and ejects the disk image)

-Core protocols (FTP, SPFTP, Flickr, etc.)

Also planned is the ability to use the grid as a script launcher. Although I am focusing on drag & drop at the moment.

It is similar to Dragster and Overflow in some ways, but one of the the key differences is that with Dropzone the focus is on being able to easily write destination scripts so you can extend Dropzone to do whatever you want. The user interface in Dropzone also offers a much more OSX native feel by using Core Animation to provide an experience similar to the OSX Dock grid.

Quicksilver can also do similar things to Dropzone using its Drag and Drop mouse triggers, but this doesn't allow you to visually choose a destination by dragging onto it like Dropzone does and you are also limited to 4 corners. This feature is more of an afterthought in Quicksilver and leaves a lot to be desired.

Hopefully that clarifies a few things!

Great write-up - would love more of these new-app-tips. keep up the good work. Hopefully people will comment more on the articles they like and reward the writers.

Looks like an implementation of Dragster from AmbrosiaSW dot com.

Wow, this looks handy, it'd kill a couple icons I have in my dock. (Folders, transmission droplets, flickr uploader)

"There is currently no shipping date set for this handy little Dock tool"
Actually, at the end of the video it sais to be launched on May 2009..so there is sort of a release date, this month, which is about 27 days more top.

You guys aren't getting it. This application is NOT for shortcuts. It allows a ton of functionality similar to Quicksilver however with the ease of drag and drop. The best part is that the API is available so that developers can incorporate their own Plugins to be added to DropZone.

I think a lot of you are totally missing the point.

Did they license the music on that site? cough.

Nice looking application though.

For sharing images/files, there's also Dockdrop: http://dockdropx.com/

You set it up with account information like FTP, WebDAV and Flickr, and you drag an image to it, select how you want to upload it, and it'll copy the URL to your clipboard.

http://stuntsoftware.com/Overflow/

Better.