Dropzone 4.2.4 has just been released and now includes support for Quick Look in Drop Bar.
Here’s a quick promo video demonstrating this new feature:

Quick Look in Drop Bar is available to all Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime and subscription customers. You can pickup a Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime license for a one time cost of $35 from the link below and unlock this and many other Dropzone 4 Pro features.

Buy Dropzone 4 Pro for $35 (USD)

By purchasing a license you’ll also be supporting continued development and allowing me to keep pushing out great new features and improving the app.

Dropzone 4 now includes a Resize Images action which allows you to resize and convert images between different formats and also change the JPG compression amount. This action is great for preparing images for emailing or for uploading to a website.

I have made a video showing how to use the action below:

The Resize Images action is available for free in Dropzone 4.
Download Dropzone 4 from https://aptonic.com

I wanted to give you a brief update on the latest Dropzone developments.

The newest update (version 4.1.7) is out now and provides preliminary macOS Monterey support and also brings a new action for you to try out if you happen to be testing out the macOS Monterey beta.

As you may know the Shortcuts app is coming to macOS in the next version of macOS and there are some awesome new workflows possible. It’s definitely shaping up to be a fantastic upgrade from Automator.

Apple have also done a great job of making Shortcuts extensible for developers and so I’ve been looking at how Dropzone can take advantage of these new APIs.

To begin with I have added a new action that allows you to easily run Shortcuts from the Dropzone grid. If you’re running Dropzone 4 under Monterey then this new action will appear in your Dropzone add actions menu. Note that this action currently also requires the non-Mac App Store or Setapp version of Dropzone.

This is just the beginning and I have much deeper integration planned (such as the ability to run Dropzone actions from within a Shortcuts workflow) but in the meantime, make sure you update to 4.1.7 and keep the feedback coming!

 

 
The complete change log for 4.1.7 is provided below:

• New Action: Run Shortcut – Under macOS Monterey beta there is now a new action available to run shortcuts
• Clicking an action in the grid now opens its config dialog if it has no click handler
• Python actions are now run with python3
• Resize Images action now supports HEIC images
• Fixes issue where AirDrop would not show as an option under macOS Monterey beta
• Fixes issue where clicking AirDrop action would not open Finder window
• Fixes issue where clicking menu item would not open grid under macOS Monterey in dual monitor configurations
• Fixes broken preferences buttons under macOS Monterey beta

The update has been released on the Mac App Store, Setapp and for the version available direct from us.
I hope you enjoy the update! Feel free to comment below or email support@aptonic.com if you have any questions or feedback.

I’m thrilled to announce another big Dropzone 4 update. Dropzone now fully supports Apple Silicon and the new M1 MacBooks and Mac Minis and will run natively without requiring the use of Rosetta. The app icon has been refined as above and the app has been made to look and feel like it fits in with the new Big Sur design language.

Dropzone 4 Running on the MacBook Air M1

I was excited to test out Big Sur and see how fast Dropzone would compile on the new M1 hardware. I use a 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro (1.4GHz i5) as my main development machine and the M1 MacBook air is over 60% faster at compiling Dropzone. I have posted the results below. It’s amazing how fast these new machines really are.

In terms of design changes Big Sur has a new translucent menu bar that changes style depending on the desktop background lightness. In this update the Dropzone 4 drag area has been made to keep its coloring consistent with the new menu bar style.

Light Background Drag Overlay Dark Background Drag Overlay

I have also tweaked the Dropzone preferences design to use the new built in SF Symbols font:

Along with these changes there are various other visual tweaks to ensure Dropzone fits right in. There are also lots of other bug fixes and improvements in this release so I highly recommend updating to this version. The update has been released on the Mac App Store, Setapp and for the version available direct from us.

I hope you enjoy the update! Feel free to comment below or email support@aptonic.com if you have any questions or feedback.

Dropzone 4.1.4 Changes

• Updated and improved for macOS Big Sur
• Support for Apple Silicon
• Updated app icon
• Drag area now automatically adjusts to dark/light tint depending on menu bar color
• Improved status item clarity on non-retina displays
• Updated preferences toolbar
• Improved Open URL action title detection

You can download Dropzone 4.1.4 from here.

Dropzone 4.1.3 has just been released. This version adds a new ‘Open URL’ action that allows you to add URLs to the grid for fast opening.
I’ve recorded a quick demo video showing how to use it below:

It auto-downloads an icon for a website and it also works with file URLs such as /Users/john/Documents/document.pdf
For file URLs it will even generate a quicklook preview for the file and use this as the action icon.

If you’re running the Pro version of Dropzone 4 then you can add as many Open URL shortcuts to your grid as you like. The free version is limited to one only.

This new action is available in the non-Mac App Store, App Store and direct download versions of the latest version of Dropzone 4.

It’s finally here: Today I am excited to announce the non-Mac App Store version of Dropzone 4.

I’ve been listening carefully to all the feedback after the initial launch of Dropzone 4 on the Mac App Store and then Setapp.
A large amount of the feedback was around Dropzone moving to the subscription model and even though many users told me they love this, many also still wanted to be able to just pay a one off fee for Dropzone 4 rather than paying a monthly recurring fee. There were also users that were frustrated that they weren’t able to get a discount on Dropzone 4 after they purchased Dropzone 3.

This is all changing today.

Today I am launching the non-Mac App Store version which comes with two different options for upgrading to Dropzone 4 Pro:

• Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime: A one off purchase for $35 USD. This gives you all the Dropzone 4 Pro features without paying a recurring fee.
• Dropzone 4 Pro Subscription: A recurring monthly fee of $1.99 USD/month. This is the same option that is currently offered in the Mac App Store version.

This new Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime purchase option gives you all the benefits of a subscription for the lifetime of Dropzone 4 but you do not have to pay any recurring monthly subscription fee. A Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime license will also include cloud features, such as cloud actions we host and update and any Pro specific features or actions we add for the lifetime of Dropzone 4.

I’ve carefully chosen the $35 USD price point for Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime to take into account the fact that there won’t be a source of recurring revenue after the initial purchase and to strike a good balance between making the business viable and not making the app prohibitively expensive. And the subscription option is also supported for non-Mac App Store users who prefer to pay a lower fee for the app on a monthly recurring basis.

And how about those discounted upgrades from Dropzone 3? This is also now an option. If you have a Dropzone 3 license you can now goto this page, enter your serial and get 30% off the purchase price of Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime or 10% recurring off a Dropzone 4 Pro subscription. For Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime this works out to only $24.50 USD one time. If you went with a Dropzone 4 Pro Subscription you would pay only $1.79/month with this discount.

The other key thing with this release is that the non-Mac App Store version of Dropzone 4 runs unsandboxed, so once you download this version you can now install and use all your favourite unsandboxed actions again. You can read more about how sandboxing impacts Dropzone 4 here.

It’s great to be able to offer all these choices and this is in large part thanks to Paddle who are handling our billing for the non-Mac App Store version of Dropzone 4 Pro.

With billing for Dropzone 4 now sorted, you can look forward to some exciting new updates and additions to the app in the near future.
You can download the latest Dropzone 4 non-Mac App Store version from here. The Dropzone 4 Pro Lifetime purchase option is available inside Dropzone 4 from the License tab in the Preferences or from our homepage here.

Feel free to post in the comments if you have any questions or feedback.

Today I’m thrilled to announce the release of Dropzone 4.
Dropzone 4 is a big release not just in terms of the app itself but also the business behind it and how I plan to run Aptonic moving forward.

Over the years, I’ve learnt so much more about app development and how to run a successful software business.
I’ve found that many of the issues with Dropzone have not been around development of the app itself but the sustainability of the business. There are so many things I have wanted to work on and improve but Dropzone has always had to remain a side project and I’ve only been able to spend a limited amount of time on it because it never quite made enough revenue to work on full time. The plan going forward is to increase the sustainability of the business so that I can spend more time building the app and shipping features, fixing bugs and helping customers.

Therefore the biggest change in this version of Dropzone is that it is transitioning to a subscription based business model. This means the base app is now totally free, but if you want to support continued development of Dropzone and use the apps premium features then it will cost $1.99 per month ($24/year). I’m hoping you’ll find the value the app delivers to your workflow easily justifies the cost of a cup of coffee each month and if successful this new model will make a world of difference to how much time I can dedicate to improving the app. Dropzone 4 is now also available on Setapp so you can get it and a bunch of other fantastic apps for $9.99 per month.

So that’s the business change. Now onto more cool app stuff. As you can see above, the icon has been totally redesigned for Dropzone 4 and the Dropzone user interface has undergone a complete redesign as well.

When you drag a file in any app in Dropzone 4, a subtle overlay will appear at the top of the screen with the Dropzone 4 icon. Simply drag files onto this area to activate the grid:

Below is a screenshot of the new Dropzone grid design:

This lighter styled grid fits in better with the design language of recent versions of macOS.
And Dropzone now supports dark mode:

As well as the app redesign and business changes, Dropzone 4 is now fully compatible with macOS Catalina. Other notable changes include the Google Drive action now being built into the app as this proved to be very popular. Dropzone has also switched to using TinyURL to handle URL shortening as Goo.gl has shutdown. There are many other enhancements and I recommend downloading Dropzone 4 from either the Mac App Store or Setapp and testing it out yourself:

The non-Mac App Store (direct) version of Dropzone 4 will be coming soon. If you need to run unsandboxed Dropzone actions then I recommend that you use the Setapp version of Dropzone for the time being.

I hope you enjoy the new version and will consider a subscription to support continued development of the app.
Feel free to leave any questions about Dropzone 4 in the comments below.

Also, checkout this full review of Dropzone 4 by TheSweetBits.

 

So I know it has been a long time since anything has been posted here on the blog. Fear not, Dropzone has been continuing development quietly in the meantime. Recently, CocoaDialog which is one of the many helper apps that Dropzone uses was throwing up a warning for about a lack of 64-bit support. CocoaDialog is used in an action when you want to prompt the user for a filename, folder name or some other info. I checked out the latest code for CocoaDialog for GitHub and went about compiling it for 64-bit but found that the project was in an sorry state indeed and nothing worked anymore. I was just considering writing my own version of it when a customer emailed to tell me how much he liked Dropzone and that he was using Pashua in his own Dropzone actions.

I took a look at Pashua and found it was the perfect drop in replacement for CocoaDialog – it even has Ruby and Python bindings. So, in the latest version of Dropzone CocoaDialog has been replaced with Pashua instead.

Here’s an example of how you can use it to prompt for some text in a Dropzone action:

Ruby:
[ruby]
def clicked
config = ”
*.title = Test Dialog
p.type = textfield
p.label = Enter some text
”
result = $dz.pashua(config)
$dz.url(false)
end
[/ruby]

Python:

[python]

def clicked():
config = “””
*.title = Test Dialog
p.type = textfield
p.label = Enter some text
“””
result = dz.pashua(config)
dz.url(False)

[/python]

Would result in:

In the above example you can use the following to get the users text entry (same in Python and Ruby):

[ruby]
entered_text = result[‘p’]
[/ruby]

The users entered text would then be available in the ‘entered_text’ variable.

Lets see another example:

Ruby:
[ruby]
def clicked
config = ”
*.title = Selection Dialog
p.type = popup
p.label = Choose an option
p.width = 310
p.option = Option 1
p.option = Option 2
p.option = Option 3
cb.type = cancelbutton
b.type = button
b.label = Another button
”
result = $dz.pashua(config)
puts result[‘p’]

$dz.url(false)
end
[/ruby]

Python:
[python]
def clicked():
config = “””
*.title = Selection Dialog
p.type = popup
p.label = Choose an option
p.width = 310
p.option = Option 1
p.option = Option 2
p.option = Option 3
cb.type = cancelbutton
b.type = button
b.label = Another button
“””
result = dz.pashua(config)
print result[‘p’]

dz.url(False)
[/python]

Would result in:

The users choice would be printed in the Dropzone debug console (open the grid and press Cmd+Shift+D). If you want to know if ‘Another button’ was clicked instead, you can check this as follows:

Ruby:
[ruby]
if result[‘b’] == ‘1’
puts “Another button clicked!”
end
[/ruby]

Python:
[python]
if result[‘b’] == ‘1’:
print “Another button clicked!”
[/python]

Or to check if the user clicked the cancel button:

Ruby:

[ruby]
if result[‘cb’] == ‘1’
puts “User cancelled!”
end
[/ruby]

Python:

[python]
if result[‘cb’] == ‘1’:
print “User cancelled!”
[/python]

There are many other controls you can use, such as date pickers, checkboxes, image boxes and more. And because Pashua is now included with Dropzone, all this goodness is now available out of the box. Check out the full Pashua documentation here and let us know if you come up with any cool actions. It’s great that a customer email has resulted in a vastly better solution than I would have come up with on my own – and of course a big thanks to the Pashua developer Carsten Blüm for making a great project and releasing it under a compatible license.

Pashua is included in the latest version of Dropzone which you can update to via the Dropzone Preferences or via the Mac App Store ‘Updates’ tab.

Today I’m excited to show off a new Dropzone action I’ve been working on. This action is something I’ve wanted to make for Dropzone for a long time but all the right pieces weren’t quite there until now. The final missing piece was that the Dropzone API now supports Python and the youtube-dl project is written in Python so it became possible to combine the two. What results is a Dropzone action that lets you quickly and easily download videos for offline use from dozens of sites.

You can find a full list of video sharing sites supported by the action here.

I hope you find it useful and let me know if you have any feedback in the comments below. You can can install the action from this page.
Note that it requires the non-Mac App Store version of Dropzone.

Dropzone 3.6 has been released and is now available from our website and via the Mac App Store.
This update is free to all existing Dropzone 3 customers. You should be updated to this version automatically or you can force the update by going into the Updates tab in the Dropzone settings and clicking the ‘Check Now’ button.

I’ve covered what’s new in this version in detail below:

The Overlay

In this version, the way you activate Dropzone when dragging files has changed slightly. In earlier versions of Dropzone you would activate Dropzone by dragging files directly to the top of the screen. However, since OS X 10.11, Apple have made it so dragging a file to the top of the screen opens mission control – presumably so you can drag files onto a different space or fullscreen app. Unfortunately this conflicted with Dropzone so the mechanism Dropzone uses had to be changed.

In Dropzone 3.6, when you start dragging a file you’ll see an overlay appear under the Dropzone menu item and you can drag a file onto this overlay to open the Dropzone grid. This overlay has the added benefit of reminding you that Dropzone is an option when dragging a file.

The overlay has been somewhat controversial with half of customers loving it and the other half hating it. If you fall into the latter camp then there’s a hidden preference so you can disable it. If you disable it then you can instead open the grid by dragging items onto the Dropzone menu item. The downside of disabling is that the menu item provides a much smaller dragging target and is harder to hit.

In a future version of Dropzone I’m most likely going to provide a UI for this option in the Preferences and also add another option so that you can re-enable the old method of dragging to the top of the screen. This option can still work, although it’s quite easy to drag too far upwards and accidentally activate mission control.

If you prefer, you can disable the overlay opening a Terminal and copy pasting the following command:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.aptonic.Dropzone3.plist ScreenTopDragEnabled -bool false

That command will work for the non-Mac App Store version only, for the Mac App Store version the command is below:

defaults write ~/Library/Containers/com.aptonic.Dropzone3/Data/Library/Preferences/com.aptonic.Dropzone3.plist ScreenTopDragEnabled -bool false

Just change the false at the end of the command to true to re-enable it.

Locking Items in Drop Bar

Also new in this version is the option to lock items in Drop Bar so that a reference to the files remain in Drop Bar even after dragging elsewhere. This was an often requested feature – a common situation where this is useful is if you have a file that you need to regularly use like for attaching to an email. After you lock an item in Drop Bar you can just open the Dropzone grid and drag the file out whenever you need it.

To lock items in Drop Bar, just right click on a stack in Drop Bar and choose ‘Lock Item’ from the popup menu as shown above. To unlock, right click and choose ‘Unlock Item’

Adding Items to Drop Bar via the API

Also new in this version is the ability to add files to Drop Bar using the Dropzone Ruby or Python API. This would be useful for an action that produces a file result, it could then place that file in Drop Bar for dragging elsewhere. The API documentation has been updated with information about how to do this here.

Dropzone 3 Introductory Screencast

I’ve made a short introductory video where I go over the basics of how to use Dropzone. It’s well worth watching even if you’ve used Dropzone before as it shows several features that you most likely won’t be aware of. This is embedded for your viewing pleasure below:

Updated Actions Page

The page you goto to install Dropzone actions has had a major facelift. You can check out the updated page here.

Hope you like the update. As always if you have feedback or questions you can leave a comment below, email us. Or post on our forums.

Dropzone 3.6 Detailed Release Notes

New Features

• New improved dragging system for opening the Dropzone grid
• You can now lock items in Drop Bar so they don’t get removed when dragging out
• You can now add items to Drop Bar via the Ruby/Python API using the dz.add_dropbar(file_paths) API call
• Updated all app fonts for El Capitan

Bug Fixes

• Updated Sparkle to 1.13
• Updated all bundled ruby gems
• Made new screen top drag area work with menu bar hiding enabled
• Updated Shorten URL action to work with latest Google API gem
• Fixed some dual monitor bugs with new screen top drag area
• Fixed issue where Shorten URL action was failing under OS X 10.10
• Fixed issue where new screen top drag area showed when dragging layers in Photoshop CC
• Fixed issue where saving to keychain could fail
• Fixed issue where task progress bars could display incorrectly
• Fixed issue where grid could show actions incorrectly greyed out after dragging one Drop Bar stack on top of another Drop Bar stack
• Fixed two reported crashes related to Drop Bar