Ways to share screenshots on the Internet are a dime a dozen.
I used Skitch happily for quite a while. But after their acquisition by Evernote, they recently changed their share URLs to a ridiculously ugly, 108 character long (!) monstrosity. I own a number of my own domains, and not only does my screenshot sharing tool keep me from using my domains, but it also gives me URLs that look like I facerolled my keyboard? No way!
In addition, Evernote made it hard to share the URL to the image itself, rather than a webpage showing the image on it. This may help their revenue, but unnecessarily hampers the recipients' ability to use the images I share with them.
After a while, I was fed up with it, so I looked around for alternatives. I found TinyGrab, which works with OS X's screenshot function. I can even upload the files to my own server, but only using unencrypted FTP, which is scarily insecure.
CloudApp is also nice, but their for-pay plan was a little overkill for my needs.
Finally GrabBox has a great approach: It uses Dropbox (which I already have) to quickly share screenshots. The chance of using my own domain with it, however, is pretty slim.
So I made a thing.
Enter UpShot
I built UpShot, a simple (Python-based) OS X application that does the following:
- It hangs out in your OS X statusbar, waiting for you to take a screenshot
- when you do, it moves that file to the Dropbox public directory
- and copies the URL to the file into your clipboard automatically
After a few weeks of tinkering with it on and off, I am happy to have released the first version: UpShot 0.9. (Why not 1.0? Read on.)
Contributions welcome
The first version seems to work great for me. However, I am sure there are bugs or more or less obvious things missing.
My most attentive readers may also have noticed that this first version does not yet actually support your own domain name. The code exists, but I will need to write a blog post about it, so I am waiting to call it version 1.0 until that's done!
If you want to give it a shot, I suggest you install it, try to break it, peruse the code and shudder at my PyObjC skills -- and then please contribute issues and pull requests to the UpShot github project.
UpShot is open source and licensed under a BSD license!
Try UpShot now!
I compiled UpShot as an OS X app and put a standard .dmg file up on the UpShot website:
I tested it on OS X 10.7. You only need to have Dropbox installed and off you go:
- Download the DMG file, double click to open
- drag the UpShot app into your
/Applicationsdirectory - go to the Applications directory and start UpShot from there. UpShot will show up in your status bar in the top right corner of the screen.
- Then go ahead and take a screenshot (CMD+Shift+3 or CMD+Shift+4) and witness it being shared automatically!
Hope you like it! Let me know what you think!
Note: If you want to stay up to date on UpShot, subscribe to the UpShot RSS feed on this blog.