Droplr

A quick update on some important bug fixes we’ve released this week.

Email Problems

When we released Droplr 2, we had some issues with registration/migration confirmation emails not being sent. This was caused by our email service failing often and we recognize it was rather frustrating. We’ve since moved to a more reliable email solution and all emails should be sending correctly now.

If you were having problems registering or migrating before, please try again.

HTTPS Issues

We were made aware of an issue yesterday where it was possible to access our migration form outside of HTTPS. We fixed the issue almost immediately after we were made aware of it. A couple important notes:

1. Although it was possible to access this, it wasn’t the normal path, so more than likely if you already migrated your account you did so over HTTPS.

2. We’ve not only updated our code to make sure that the migration page is always served over HTTPS, but we’ve also updated the web app to be served over HTTPS as well, so when you login, you should see: https://droplr.com/ for your drops homepage.

Twitter Password

We’ve been made aware that some people are concerned we’re storing your Twitter password when you enter it on our migration form. We do not do this. We’re using Twitter’s OAuth in the form of xAuth. This sends your credentials to Twitter’s servers and provides us with access tokens to use in order for us to migrate your old account. We have never and will never store your Twitter credentials.

Although we’ve been using this same flow in our iPhone app for awhile, there’s been some concern that using this flow in the web app ins’t the best practice. We recognize this and will get an OAuth redirect solution out as soon as possible. I’ll provide an update here and on Twitter when that’s released.

You can migrate your account at any time, so if you’d like to sign up for Droplr 2 now and then migrate your Droplr 1 account after we release the OAuth migration, that will work just fine. Thank you for your patience with this.

Other Issues

We’re aware of a few other serious issues like some users not being able to login from their desktop apps. We promise we’re doing our best to correct these as soon as possible. We can’t thank you enough for your continued patience. As always, please report any problems or feedback at our support site.

Today we’re excited to announce the release of Droplr 2, a significant update to Droplr, the easiest way to share files over the internet.

If you’re currently a Droplr 1 user, the first thing you’ll need to do is migrate your account to Droplr 2. Please visit droplr.com/migrate

After that, please download the updates to the desktop apps. You can download them here:

1. Download Droplr 2 for Mac
2. Download Droplr 2 for Windows

A final note, the iPhone app won’t currently work with the new Droplr 2. We’ll be submitting an update to the App Store that’s compatible as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!

We really hope you’ll love the update. If you have any problems or just general feedback, please visit support.droplr.com

We have released the 1.1 update of Droplr. You can get this update in 2 ways; “download it from our website”:http://droplr.com/hello or use the “Check for updates” button in the preferences. Here’s what’s new/fixed for this release:

Features

• Now supports 10.5 Leopard
• Upload of multiple files will now upload a zip of the files
• Upload of a package or app will now zip it before uploading
• New menu item for invoking the screenshot command
• Added hidden preference for removing “copied” from Droplr’s popup
• Droplr will now ask you to move the app to the Applications folder if you launch it from somewhere else

Fixes

• Tooltip no longer shows wrong file size in recent drops menu
• Loading of recent drops menu is now more efficient/faster
• Using the “Launch Droplr website” option now goes to your home page instead of /hello
• Uploading folders no longer results in the path’s folders in the resulting zip file
• Start on login should be more reliable with some systems
• Dragging images from iChat no longer causes a crash
• Dragging items from iTunes no longer causes a crash
• Files now successfully deleted off server after deleting them from the web app
• Links should properly link to the correct domain in the web app
• The popup should be more reliable in showing text
• Greatly improved interface speed and responsiveness
• Composing a new note from the menubar should no longer start a note with the clipboard contents
• Shortening links to google maps should now be more reliable
• Improved first run experience
• General stability fixes
• General interface improvements

Known Issues

• Removed Echofon support because Echofon’s URL handler does not work properly system-wide
• Hide dock icon preference still needs to be reset after each update
• Dragging items from stacks won’t work due to OS X’s implementation

Beta users, because of the new authentication we’re using with the public release of Droplr, you’ll notice that your beta account and your new account are in no way linked.

If you’d like to have all of your images/files/links/notes from your beta account merged with your new account, we need you to simply do a couple things.

1. Sign in to the new droplr at http://droplr.com at least once using your Twitter account.

2. Send us an email, droplr@me.com, with the user ID# of that account. If you need help finding your user ID#, there’s a help doc here: http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15360. If you use Tweetie on your iPhone, it will also show you your ID# on your profile. Please be sure to use the email address that is associated with your beta account.

Once we have your Twitter ID we’ll merge your account over and everything you did during beta should be available in your new account.

In the meantime, if you need access to any of your old files, you can visit http://archive.droplr.com. We won’t be keeping this up for very long however, so if you need any of your stuff please get back to us so we can merge it over asap.

Thank you for your help and your continued patience.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re in a period of testing right now but are aware of most bugs in the current build available. Please hold off on sending us any bug reports until we push a new build out, at which point we’ll ask you once again to participate in testing.

Also, you are using a BETA account right now. Please don’t upload anything that you would mind loosing.

It’s no secret that screenshot sharing has been a big request for Droplr. Even so much that we’ve had users already creating scripts and services to do it ;). We hear you! And believe us, we want it to … but we want it right.

Many apps similar to Droplr upload screenshots automatically. There’s even a few awesome services out there wholly devoted to this task. There was the great GrabUp and then the even cooler TinyGrab (and many more). Each of these services works by listening in the background for you to take a screenshot, and as soon as you do, it uploads that shot to a server and copies the URL to your clipboard so you can share it out. However, I’ve personally been really dissatisfied with the workflow of these types of apps.

The problem that I’ve always had with these services is that they don’t quite work the way I do. I take many screenshots per day, for many various reasons. But I don’t want to share *every* screenshot I take. The amount I want to share is a pretty low percentage, maybe about 1/3. So uploading every screenshot ends up with a bunch of files I never intended to share on a server somewhere. Not to mention some of them I might wanted to have been private, meaning I either have to turn the app off before hand or go delete it from the server.

I think we’ve found a workflow for Droplr that solves this problem pretty well.

Most of the time when I’m taking a screenshot, I know the purpose of it beforehand. I’m either taking a screenshot to use for my own purposes, in which I want the file on my desktop so I can then load it into Photoshop or import it into an app like LittleSnapper. On the other hand, if I’m taking a screenshot for the purpose of sharing with someone, I usually don’t have a need for the file itself and trash it right after it has been successfully uploaded. Which in itself is often an annoying task, that all these screenshots litter my desktop when I never needed the file.

So for Droplr what we’re doing is enabling a different shortcut key combination, separate from the main Droplr shortcut, to initiate a screenshot for sharing. It will be the standard screenshot behaviour you get with OS X with cmd+shft+4 which gives you a crosshair for you to select the area you want to capture. In this mode you can either capture your whole screen or just a small section of the screen. You can also use the spacebar to trigger “Window” mode which will allow you to capture objects in OS X such as windows, menus, icons, etc… (and you even get a spiffy icon from NeXTSTEP to do it). After you’ve made the selection we’ll upload the screenshot right to Droplr and give you the standard behavior of the link & popup. The advantage of course being that the file never litters your system.

We believe this will work well in separating screenshot behaviour into the user’s intent, 1, for their own use and 2, for sharing. We’ll be pushing this out as a small part of our next update to the app. Beta testers, please be ready to test it out and provide feedback on how it’s working for you on http://talk.droplr.com.

We’ve just pushed out another update to Droplr’s web application, recycled edition™. For the goods, log in and make sure and do a shift-refresh to clear your cache.

1. We’ve added a settings page finally where you can manage your account information including your name, email address and password.

2. We’ve added a few display options for the app pages, mainly giving you the control over how many items show on a page before pagination occurs.

3. We’ve added the ability for different domains when using Droplr. Currently, the default behaviour is to link an item with http://droplr.com/LINK but we’ve had some feedback that some people would appreciate shorter URLs. We’ve added another domain option which will be http://drp.ly/LINK, very similar to http://bit.ly which many people are already familiar with due to its large use on Twitter. As well, you can use your own domain if you’d like! Go to the settings page once logged in to check it all out.

4. You can now navigate the web interface with the keyboard. This should just give those power users a way to navigate around without having to use the mouse as much. We’ve tried to keep to some standard conventions such as “j/k” for previous/next page, “1” for home and “2-5” for toolbar items. You can find a full list of the keyboard shortcuts on the help page once logged in.

*note on the custom domains, the web app currently supports these but if you use a large domain the display in the popup will be a little wonky. It still works just fine but we’ll have a fix for this display issue in our next release.

We have a few tiny updates to push out later in this week for the web app and then we’ll be turning our attention to the desktop application for a major update. We have some really cool & exciting things planned for it for this next release … so stay tuned!

As always, we really appreciate your feedback, bug reports and support on http://talk.droplr.com, our members-only forum.

Sorry for the late post on this, but in case you missed it, we made just a few refinements to the web interface earlier this week.

You can now sort each section by using the section headers. These sorts will be remembered by your browser so when you return you can begin where you left off.

Secondly, we’ve added a basic filter to each section. For now, it filters through the filenames of each section, although we’re open to adding more fields to it if it makes sense in the future. Hopefully this will go a long way in helping you find what you’re looking for when managing your stuff.

As always, another update coming soon :)

You: Why can’t I get a Droplr account?

Us: We have to keep things close right now as we’re still testing and building the service. Bugs, crashes and other bad things will occur. As we put things together, it’s important that we not overload ourselves too soon and keep the pool of testers small, focused and purposed.

You: I was on the initial newsletter list and haven’t received an invite.

Us: This is probably a fluke as when we first did our first beta roll out we were seeing a lot of email services munching up our invites in their junk mail. Remember that beta thing (see above)? We’re sorry about this, and if you contact us we’ll get it sorted up.

You: Is there anyway I can get an invite right now?

Us: Here’s a secret. Everyone in the initial beta group has one invite to share! Maybe if you ask them nicely, they’ll share the invite with you. Or maybe if you have an invite to another private beta service, you could swap.

You: But I’ve already asked everyone, isn’t there any other way?

Us: Yes! Droplr is trying out a new site called Kickstarter which might allow us to help fund the project in its initial stages. Every pledge will receive an invite to the beta immediately if the project is funded. As a bonus, you’ll also receive a free premium subscription. And if that wasn’t enough, you’ll also be helping Droplr get developed even quicker AND supporting Mac indie development. Could it get any better!? No. You can pledge here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1982780929/droplr

You: Anything else?

Us: A big thanks to all our beta testers who have been helping us improve the service. The best is yet to come!

Just a quick note to let you know that there’s a few updates today in the web interface. We’ve exposed thumbnails for the images section which should help out in managing your stuff. Also, we’ve finally added delete functionality! :)