Droplr‘s been a crowd-favorite way to quickly share files from your Mac’s menubar for years, one that’s one many over including myself. Its basic file-sharing service is fast and customizable with a pro account, and its apps are far more powerful while staying as simple to use as its competition. And now, it’s taking steps to take its pro accounts beyond basic file sharing.
The brand-new Droplr Draw is the first step towards that new future. With the latest v3.5 update to Droplr’s app, you’ll find an included basic annotation app to quickly markup and share images on Droplr. Either select the new Capture & Draw Screenshot option in the menubar app, or press Alt+Shift+4 to directly select an area of the screen (or additionally press your spacebar and select a window) and capture a screenshot that’ll then be opened directly in the Droplr Draw app.
Droplr Draw in action
There, you’ll find a basic draw, circle, square, arrow, and text tool to add the most basic annotations to your screenshot. You can’t change the color of the annotations from the default blue, or change the font of your text — indeed, the only thing you can change is the placement/size of objects, or remove them with a tap of delete. Annotations finished, you can simply hit CMD+enter on your keyboard or press the Upload button to immediately upload the tweaked image to Droplr. It’s the very most basic screenshot annotation tool you could imagine.
Much like the existing note tool in Droplr, Draw is a mini-app included with Droplr that you can use — or just use your own favorite tools instead. After all, you could tweak a photo in Preview then save and upload it to Droplr, or tweak it in Photoshop and press Alt+D to instantly upload it to Droplr. The new Draw tool just simplifies that, making basic annotations as drop-dead simple as possible and leaving the rest to other apps. In a market where the other most popular annotation tool — Skitch — is owned by Evernote, it seems a sensible extension for Droplr.
In another interesting move, Droplr has announced Droplr for Business on their site as a collaboration tool for sharing files with your team. It’s yet to be released, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it.
For now, though, Droplr continues to be one of the best ways to quickly share files online, and if you have a subscription to their now-$5.99/month Pro service, be sure to take Droplr Draw for a spin. It’s the simplest way to tweak screenshots and share them on Droplr with no fuss. My only real surprise is that it’s only available for pro subscribers; seems opening it to free users, too, would at worst get them to use Droplr more and eventually perhaps subscribe to pro.
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