Wrap: System-Wide Sharing to Messages, Twitter, Facebook, and More

One of the many cool new features that we got with Mountain Lion was native integration from the OS to services like Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and Flickr, as well as Apple’s own Messages and Airdrop. Haven’t checked them out? Try pulling up the Notification Center and check out those “Tweet” and “Post to Facebook” buttons, or right click anything inside the Finder and go to the “Share” submenu. Cool, huh?

Unfortunately, sharing to those services is kind of limited to a few places in the OS, like the ones that I mentioned. If you want to share something from your browser (if you don’t use Safari) or any other place, then you’re out of luck. Wouldn’t it be cool, then, to have an app that implemented these sharing dialogs system-wide? We’ve got it, and we’re checking it out today. It’s called Wrap.

Wrap

Wrap is a fairly simple app and it takes about no time to explain, but the idea behind is great and I’ve found it immensely useful in the short time that I’ve been using it.

Wrap lives in your menu bar, always ready to pop up when you command it. When you do, you’ll find a small window that contains links for sharing content to services like Messages, Facebook, and a few more, as well as the latest item that you’ve copied to your clipboard (any kind of item, although we’ll get to this next).

In order to exploit the full potential of Wrap, you might want to set up your social network accounts in Mac OS, if you haven’t. You can do that under the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” menu inside the System Preferences.

Supported Items

Wrap handles text and images primarily, although it works with pretty much any kind of file. If your most recent copied item is a string of text, it won’t be sent as a text message, but as a .txt attachment. This is useful when you’re sending over long pieces of content, but it’s a little weird when you’re only sharing a few words (like the name of an app that you want to share).

I should point out, though, that clipping a combination of types of files (for example, both text and images) won’t work with Wrap. Links also only get treated as text, so if you want to share an interesting article to Twitter, Wrap won’t work for it as it will only give you the option to send it to that service.

If what you’re sharing is an image, Wrap will let you send it over to a few more services, and how your image gets sent depends on the service that you choose. Sharing text only works with Mail.app, Messages and Airdrop. If you’re sharing an image instead, you can send it over to those services as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Videos work with Messages, Mail, Airdrop and Vimeo. Pretty much any other kind of file that you try to send will only work with Mail, Airdrop and Messages.

Services

In my time using Wrap I could never get the app to work with Mail properly, but everything else works pretty well, and most of the services even take advantage of Mac OS’s native integration of them.

Facebook sharing, for example, will bring up the same sharing window that you get when you try to share something through the Notification Center. Your image will already be attached to your publication and you can tweak a few settings about it, like the privacy settings (who can see it), the album where it’ll get published, the location, and you can as well send it over with a caption.

Twitter sharing works similarly, except here you’re limited to only sharing the image, your location, and the contents of the tweet, as well as mention some other users. Flickr and Vimeo sharing just as well use the native integration, letting you share your images and videos with a title, description, tags, and the “access” level (privacy).

Messages and Airdrop sharing are pretty simple. You just have to select the user or computer that you’d like to share with, and that’s it.

Why Use It?

I’ve used apps like Droplr in the past to quickly upload things and share them with people, but I believe Wrap might be a step above those kinds of apps if you intend to use it this way. Sure, Droplr lets you upload any kind of file that you’d like for easy sharing, but if your content is a picture or a long string of text, Wrap is a lot more direct.

With Wrap, instead of having to upload your content and then go running to your mail or social network account to share your generated link, you can just directly post it to the service of your choosing, saving yourself a step.

Conclusion

Wrap is a super simple way to share whatever it is that you want directly to the service of your liking. Having it work with the clipboard isn’t really as convenient as having it work as a drag-and-drop, but it gets the job done and that’s just a minor detail.

If you’re only going to be sharing content from Finder, then you don’t really need this app as what it does is already built in there (by right-clicking any item and going to the “Share” menu). All this app does is implement those same dialogs in a more universal environment, outside of Finder. This way, you can share content from anywhere, like your browser or your RSS app.

What do you think about it? Do you use the Mac’s system integration with external services often? Would you use an app like this? Let us know!