Wanted to let you know about some new actions and action updates released recently for Dropzone 3.
Google Drive
You can easily upload files to your Google Drive account by dragging them onto this action. Simply drop the file or files you want to upload onto the action and then choose which folder in your Google Drive you want to put the files in. Major thanks to Alexandru Chirițescu for his hard work developing this action.
You can install this action from here.
Note that this action requires a minimum of Dropzone version 3.2.1 to work, for more info on this see the note at the end of this blog post.
Google Image Search
The idea for this action came from a customer on the Aptonic forums. You can drop and image on it and then it shows the Google Image search results for that image in your browser. You can also drop multiple files on it and the search results will open in separate tabs.
You can install this action from here.
Send iMessage With Attachment to Phone Number
This one was another great idea from a customer. The use case was a father who wanted to send pictures regularly of his son to a particular phone number (his grandparents) using iMessage. After you add this action to your grid, drag a file onto it and it will prompt you for the phone number (which is then saved) – you can also have multiple instances of the action with different phone numbers and you can send multiple files with it at once.
You can install this action from here.
Zip Files
This was a popular action in Dropzone 2 and its now been updated for Dropzone 3. When you add it to your grid you’ll be asked which folder you want the zip archives placed. You can then drop files or folders onto it and they will be zipped.
You can install this action from here.
Note that this action requires a minimum of Dropzone version 3.2.1 to work, for more info on this see the note at the end of this blog post.
Say Text
This is a really simple but handy action. You drop text on it and it reads it aloud to you using the system voice.
You can install this action from here.
Print (Updated and Improved)
This action has always been a bit troublesome. At the start I developed it to be a really quick and dirty way to print a file and it originally only supported printing image and PDF files but many people requested support for more file formats (Especially MS Office docs). I originally did a bit of a hack to make Word/Excel/PPT docs print – they used to be rendered by capturing and printing the QuickLook preview so the formatting tended to be pretty terrible. I’ve now updated this action to actually open the appropriate MS Office app (such as MS Word), tell it to print using AppleScript and then close. This seems to be working better.
You can install this action from here.
Dropzone 3.2.1 Note
Due to recent API improvements the Google Drive and Zip Files actions require a minimum of Dropzone version 3.2.1 to work. The non-Mac App Store version of Dropzone 3.2.1 has already been released and the Mac App Store version will be updated to 3.2.1 soon. If you’re using the Mac App Store version and want to get the 3.2.1 update now you can switch to the non-Mac App Store version by downloading it from here and moving it to your applications folder replacing your existing App Store version. When you run it, it will detect you purchased already on the Mac App Store and register you automatically. Full details on this process are given here. Note that you have to run the Mac App Store version at least once first for this transition to work.
TwitPic Action Removed
Twitpic will be shutting down September 25th so the TwitPic action has been removed from the main actions list and will no longer work after this date. Fortunately there are many other alternatives such as the built in Imgur action Dropzone 3 ships with or the ImageShack action.
If you have feedback on the new actions or have an idea for a great action, let us know in the comments below!