Hi, I'm Carlo, the Droplings dev. I wrote it because I'm a freelancer, and often need to send files to clients. Just sending them the link would work, but I feel having a branded preview page makes for a more professional appearance.
But if you don't like the preview page, Droplings can give you a direct link to the file, too. Just hold the Shift key when dropping the file.
I wrote a javascript file that does exactly what you mention, from Launchbar. You can take a screenshot, give it a file type, compression rate, etc and it auto gets the url and stores the image in a intelligent manner.
ie.
Key functionality: it uploads screenshot, files and stores them on ~/Dropbox/Public/screenshots/year/month/timestamp.jpg for screenshots and ~/Dropbox/Public/files/year/filename.ext for files.
However, what you propose seems interesting. I think I'll implement a variation of that for my script.
I was just about to pay for another month of CloudApp.
I'm still going to do that as the 'automatically upload screenshots' feature is just too killer to give up.
But if Droplings had that, I'd definitely pay for it.
Check out Slingshot- basically CloudApp for Dropbox. It sits in your menu-bar. When you take a screenshot, it uploads it to your DropBox public folder and puts the link in your clipboard. Super easy and no subscription (I think it costs like 3 bucks in the App Store)
What about using the Dropbox URL shortener instead of a custom Droplings one? I'm not sure if that's possible or not, but my one qualm about your app is the sustainability of yet another URL shortener.
Otherwise, this looks awesome. Looking forward to 1.0!
Cool! Always felt like sharing public files via Dropbox wasn't quite as quick as it should be. Seems similar to CloudApp's menu bar app: http://getcloudapp.com/
I would add the "why" to the front page. When I read the top paragraph, first reaction was - "I can do that with Dropbox itself already". I'd add something about easily sharing.
