Robo

You can do a lot of neat little things with the new automator services-template. In my last post I wrote about making a litle automation to replace a feature that wasn’t in dropbox in Snow Leopard, but you can go further. Why not make the service copy any selected file over to the dropbox public folder and then copy the public URL to the clipboard.

It’s basically the same automation as in part one, but the applescript does more:

(UPDATED)

1. Open up automator again and choose the services template.

2. At “Service receives selected” choose “all files and folders” in “all programs” (you can choose the finder too, but i don’t see why “all programs” would be an issue).

3. The workflow goes: –> execute applescript –> copy to clipboard

4. In the applescript section you write:

<(*Created by Robin Ramael on 29th of august 2009
Under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

FILL IN YOUR DROPBOX USER ID BELOW!!!!
*)

on run {input, parameters}
 
 (*FILL IN YOUR DROPBOX USER ID HERE*)
 set userid to 244025
(*FILL IN MAXIMUM FILESIZE  (in mb) HERE*)
 set maximumfilesize to 50


  
 set dropboxpath to (path to home folder) & "Dropbox:Public:" as string
 
 (*Check if filesize isn't too big*)
 get size of (info for input)
 set filesize to result / 1000000
if filesize is greater than maximumfilesize then
 say "woaw"
 display dialog "This file is larger than 50 mb, are you sure you want to upload it to Dropbox?" with icon caution
 end if
 
 (*Copy file*)
 tell application "Finder"
 duplicate input to folder dropboxpath with replacing
 end tell
 
 (*Get the name of the file to put in clipboard later in the automation*)
 tell application "Finder"
 get name of (info for input)
 set filename to result
 set dURL to "http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/" & userid & "/" & filename as string
 end tell
 
return dURL
end run

(Replace the ‘xxxxxx’by your dropbox user id. Remember, you can get this ID by going to any of your public files in the browser and looking at the URL. For example, if you have the URL “http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/123456/file.txt”, 123456 is your user ID.

You also might have to replace the “smart quotes” with normal quotes, i’d put in

tags but there is no support for them with applescript…)

5. Save as “Copy to Public Dropbox and copy URL”  and we’re done! You can now go to any file , right-click it and click  ”Copy to Public Dropbox and copy URL” or whatever you named it and voila, the file is copied to your dropbox and the URL is copied to your clipboard.

The applescript also checks if the filesize isn’t too big (default is larger than 50 mb, but you can change that) to make sure you don’t accidentally start uploading a 4 GB file to you tiny, tiny dropbox.

UPDATE:  This currently only works with some filenames. Filenames with spaces or presumably backslasher are ‘not yet supported.’I’ll have to poke myself for version 1.01.