Robo

For some reason Dropbox doesn’t fully work in Mac OSX 10.6. You can upload files and whatnot, but one feature I really liked, isn’t there (yet).

The feature that is still missing at this point is being able to copy the public URL of the file to the clipboard to send it through IM or in a forum, etc. Using automator’s new services-feature, you can easily make something like this on your own:

UPDATED: Doesn’t work on all filenames.

AND UPDATED AGAIN: Dropbox now fixed this issue, rendering my ‘hard work’pointless. You can get it here.

1. Open up automator 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:

on run {input, parameters}

set userid to xxxxxx

–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. 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.)

5. Save as “Copy public URL”  and we’re done! You can now go to any file (but it won’t have any effect unless you’re in the dropbox public folder), right-click it and click  ”Copy public URL” or whatever you named it and voila!

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.