We’ve just pushed out Dropzone 0.3.3.

This version includes a boatload of bugfixes, but also a couple of new features.

Most significantly, we have majorly improved and revamped the Install Application destination so it can handle more situations and added support for dragging items from iTunes.

Here’s a quick demo:

So right click on the Dropzone dock icon and click ‘Check for updates…’ now.
Let us know what you think of the new version.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank both Philippe Martin and Justin Mrkva of NovaStorm Software for their help and patience fixing some pretty nasty bugs.

There’s an interesting thread developing on our newly created forums.

I’ve asked Dropzone users to post a screenshot of their grids and then explain how they use each destination they have added.

If you’ve been playing with Dropzone but aren’t sure how to get the most out of it, this is a great way to learn about how other users (myself included) use Dropzone in their daily Mac workflows.

Go check it out and then tell us how you use Dropzone.

So, we went and added multitasking support, and while we were at it, greatly improved the task status window user interface.

New tasks get added to the bottom of the stack, and when a task finishes, the tasks below it slide up. So you can now run as many tasks as you like.

The other cool thing is that the destination icon is now shown beside each task so you can easily tell which task is which.

I think after trying it, you’ll agree that this takes the app to a whole new level.

Here’s a quick screencast showing how all this works:

As you can see, we’ve also redone the Recent URLs feature. It stores the last 15 URLs, remembers them between launches and you can still access the list even when Dropzone is closed.

We’ve also fixed a bunch of bugs and made some enhancements to the API for destination developers.

IMPORTANT: We have discovered a bug in our auto-updating system that will prevent existing users from automatically upgrading to 0.3.2. So you will need to uninstall your current version and install the new one manually. This is not as painful as it sounds, to uninstall Dropzone, simply drag it out of your dock. A dialog box will pop up, click ‘Uninstall Dropzone’ and it will be removed from your system.

Then download Dropzone 0.3.2 from here. Unzip it and double click on Dropzone.app. You do not need to move it to your applications folder, as Dropzone will do this for you. Your destinations database and registration info will be preserved.

As shown in the video, we have been mainly focusing on improving the underlying infrastructure of the app.

Now that we have these important parts working the way they should we will start adding new features with multi-tasking and API improvements being a priority.

After two months of solid development. Dropzone 0.3.0 is finally ready for release.
To upgrade now, click on the Dropzone dock icon then on the Dropzone menu and click ‘Check for updates…’

This is a big update, and although only a couple of new features have been added, lots of work has been done behind the scenes to make Dropzone more usable.

All the grid rendering code has been redone from scratch to be faster and smoother, and also, you can now resize the grid icons, which is especially useful on smaller screens where you don’t want the grid taking up so much space. I recorded a quick screencast of these updates here.

We’ve also added an SCP upload destination which lets you easily upload files via SSH thanks to the work of Peder Olsen.

You need to be running Dropzone 0.3.0 to use this destination. So if this is something you need, upgrade and then download this destination here.

Dropzone Review from Zettt on Vimeo.

Thanks Zettt!

We’ve just pushed Dropzone 0.2.9 via Sparkle. It fixes a bunch of bugs and adds several cool new features:

First of all, Dropzone’s Install Application destination now supports zip files. So you can drag a zip file containing an application onto your grid and Dropzone will extract it, move the application to your applications folder, run it and trash the zip for you.

But the other really neat thing is that you can now open dmg and zip files directly with Dropzone without even using the grid. Here’s a screencast showing this new feature being used to install Things from a disk image in just two clicks:

You can set this up in Firefox by selecting Dropzone as your ‘Open with’ application once and it will remember to open dmg files with Dropzone in future.

If you’re installing an application from a zip file like say, Delicious Library for example, you can right click on the file and then use Finders ‘Open With’ menu to install the application inside.

Another thing, if you’re feeling brave, you can set Dropzone as the default application to handle all dmgs on your Mac. You can set this up by right clicking on a dmg, selecting ‘Get Info’, and then selecting Dropzone from the ‘Open With’ Drop down menu and clicking ‘Change All…’

If you happen to open a dmg that doesn’t contain an application, Dropzone will still mount the disk image as normal and show you the contents, so you can use it as a drop in replacement for the default DiskImageMounter.

The other new feature in 0.2.9 is Dropbox support, but we’ll talk more about that in a later post.

We’ve just added a bit.ly URL shortener destination. If you drop a URL on it, a shorter bit.ly URL will be put on your clipboard.

bit.ly is probably the best URL shortener as it lets you track how many clicks your URL has had.

As an example, here is a URL shortened with bit.ly:

http://bit.ly/K1t2u

To get stats on the URL, I go to:

http://bit.ly/info/K1t2u

Under my bit.ly account I can also choose whether I want stats for the URL to be public and see a listing of recently shared URLs. bit.ly can also be set to auto-tweet my URLs. Very useful.

Download the Dropzone destination script here. You need to sign up for a free bit.ly account to use it.

Thanks to Sergej Müller for contributing this!

We’ve just added a pretty neat destination – If you drag a file or image onto it, it immediately prints it to your default printer.

You can also drag multiple files onto it – e.g. if I want to print a bunch of text files or PDFs I just drag them onto the Print destination and they’re sent to the printer.

And it’s 3 lines of code. No joke. Download here.

We’ve recently released Dropzone 0.2.7 which adds support for Snow Leopard.

If you zoom up the screenshot, you’ll see that it even uses the new Snow Leopard grid border – just like the built in Dock grids.