Droplr

Homepage Redesign

You might notice Droplr’s homepage looking a lot nicer today. We’ve redesigned it to communicate more clearly, load more quickly, and provide you and your friends a better experience. Load it up on your nearest high-pixel-density device, and you should be in for a pleasant surprise there as well :)

We’ve moved from a drag-and-drop interaction on the homepage to click-to-upload, which means you no longer need to explain dragging and dropping to your less technically-adept friends and relatives. Of course, we didn’t take this away from you. If you still want to do it the old way, give it a shot :) Additionally, we’re now highlighting a few of the great third party applications you can use Droplr with.

Beyond the homepage redesign, we’ve made some more tweaks, mostly aimed at speed. The most notable of these changes are for drop pages. When you’re viewing a drop from your phone, you should get a much faster, more bandwidth-sensitive page.

We’ve put a lot of time and love into these updates, and we hope you enjoy them! If you have any feedback at all, let us know on Twitter or our help site.

Droplr for Mac 3 on the Mac App Store

Droplr for Mac 3, which we released as a stand alone version at the beginning of August is now finally available as an update on the Mac App Store!

After nearly two months and half a dozen rejections, we were able to work out a solution with Apple that meets all their new requirements for Sandboxing and still provides the desired user experience for our customers. This was a long process for us, but we sincerely appreciate your patience as we worked through various solutions.

As excited as we are that our latest and greatest is now once again on the App Store, we did need to compromise on a few minor things in order to adhere to approval guidelines. Our standalone version, available from our homepage will continue to behave as before. But our App Store version will have these changes/limitations:

• The Droplr key combination (opt+d by default) will no longer upload the selected file(s) in the Finder. Instead, using the key combination will open an “open file” dialog where you’ll be able to select the file(s) you’d like to share.
• The Xcode Droplet plugin has been removed.
• The Address Book Droplet plugin has been removed.

Given these changes, we will continue to offer Droplr for Mac as a standalone app from our website along with offering it in the Mac App Store. Our intention is to keep both on the same upgrade path and hold feature parity, save for the items listed above.

We have added the ability to subscribe to Droplr Pro via Apple’s In-App Purchasing. If you have a free account, you can visit Droplr for Mac’s preferences where you’ll be able to purchase one year of Droplr Pro. One important note, due to a current limitation with Apple’s In-App Purchasing, we aren’t able to offer a recurring subscription right now through the App Store, so you’ll need to re-purchase this each year.

Droplr Referrals - Get free space!

We’re excited to announce Droplr’s new referral program. We’d like to reward you for telling your friends, family, and co-workers about Droplr!

For every new person you invite to use Droplr, once they’ve registered a free account, we’ll reward both of you with an extra 200mb in storage. We currently let you invite up to 20 people, which means up to 4GB of extra space.

To access this, when you’re signed into Droplr, head to droplr.com/invite. From there, you can invite people by email or posting to Facebook & Twitter. There’s also a personalized referral link you can use to post anywhere, including your own website or blog. Anyone that signs up via that link will earn you the bonus.

Some other updates that went out today include:

• Ability to delete an account. See this in the settings of the web app. (Note, this cannot be undone).
• Completely new registration and sign in flows. They’re also now responsive to provide a better experience of registering from a mobile device.
• Revamped and improved the display of markdown note drops.
• Now show uploaded text files as note drops.
• Lots of internal changes to improve the speed and stability of the application.

Droplr and the Mac App Store

When OS X Mountain Lion was announced this year, we immediately began work on the next version of Droplr to include all the new and exciting functionality like Notification Center. We had planned to have this update available in the Mac App store by the day Mountain Lion shipped.

This next version was a significant update for us because it included 3 major tracks of development:

1. Integrating with new Mountain Lion APIs to take advantage of the great new features in OS X.
2. In-App purchasing for subscribing to Droplr Pro from the Mac app and adhering to Apple’s subscription policies.
3. Sandboxing.

We submitted Droplr for Mac 3.0 to the Mac App Store review team and were promptly rejected for issues with our adhering to Apple’s sandboxing policies. We didn’t expect any problems with sandboxing, so this rejection came as a surprise to us.

The very first thing we realized was that if we were going to get Droplr for Mac approved, it was most likely going to be a lengthy process of working with Apple to find the right solution. We therefore made the decision to step back and work on a standalone release that we could get in your hands quickly.

Once we were able to release Droplr for Mac 3.0 from our website, we set back to work on getting it approved for the Mac App Store. We’ve been in constant communication with Apple and have submitted a few more times since, all ending up with similar issues and similar rejections.

We’ve received a little more clarification from Apple today and they’ve made it clear to us that certain functionality of our app will not be possible to be accepted at this point in time. Our only recourse with the app as it stands today is to begin a lengthy appeals process.

In light of that, we’ve decided on a strategy for the Mac App Store version of Droplr and we’d like to share that with you. Going forward, we will continue to maintain a version of Droplr for the Mac App Store, but it will by neccessity contain slightly less functionality than the standalone version from our website will offer.

The primary difference will be in the use of the global hotkey (opt+d by default) to share the currently selected item(s) in the Finder. The standalone version will continue to work as it always has, simply select something in the Finder, use the key combination, and that item will be uploaded to Droplr. For the Mac App Store version, when the key combination is triggered with the Finder active, instead of uploading the currently selected items, it will present you with an “open file” dialog where you’ll need to navigate to the item(s) you’d like to share and select them. We don’t believe this provides the best experience, but we do believe it’s an acceptable tradeoff to be able to remain in the Mac App Store, especially given many of our users don’t use the key combination as a primary method of sharing with Droplr. A couple important points of clarification:

• This behavior will only be when the Finder is active. The Droplr key combination will continue to work in other apps just as it has before (Photoshop, for example).
• This change does not affect the keyboard combinations for taking a screenshot or composing a note. Those will continue to work as they always have.

We plan to have the new version with the neccessary changes submitted to Apple. We continue to thank you for your patience as we work to get it out there for you. We’ll also continue the appeals process with Apple in the meantime to see if there’s anyway we can possibly once again provide our desired user experience from the Mac App Store version.

Important Droplr 2 Bug Fixes

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.

Droplr 2 Migration

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

Droplr 1.1 update now live

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 testers, merge your account

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.

Welcome new testers

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.