Dear Aunt TUAW: Snow Leopard killed GrabUp, Auntie fixes it

Dear Auntie TUAW,

I love GrabUp. GrabUp is my BFF. It automatically uploads my screen shots to the GrabUp web site and copies the URL to my clipboard. If GrabUp were a girl, I'd marry her like *snap* that. But Snow Leopard has killed GrabUp. It doesn't work. My darling is dead.

I tried TinyGrab as well and that isn't working either. Frankly, between you and me, TinyGrab has issues. It's slow and does not work all the time. I miss GrabUp :(

Love and kisses,

Your Nephew J.

Darling J,

My heart goes out to you. I too am a GrabUp aficionado! Because I love you (and all my nephews and nieces) and because I really needed to get GrabUp working again for my own use, I put together a work-around for you! (Here is the zipped command line utility) Download, unzip, switch off GrabUp, and run this at the command line.

Grabupper looks for new screen shots on the Desktop using the Snow Leopard screenshot naming standard. When it finds them, it uploads the data to the GrabUp website, copies the URL, pastes it to your clipboard, and lets you know when the URL is ready to use.

The grabupper utility uses a few shortcuts for expedience. It only looks on the Desktop, and it only looks for names starting with "Screen shot". The reason I mention this is because you can change the screen shot prefix using defaults write com.apple.screencapture name prefix, but if you do so, you'll have to update the utility source code to match that prefix.

You'll find the source code over at GitHub. It works like this. A notification observer looks for com.apple.carbon.core.DirectoryNotification events, which are associated with the screen shot updates. When these events trigger, the file manager searches for new screen shots that are less than 5 seconds old. When it finds one, it converts the file to JPEG format (Auntie loves using non-compatible TIFFs for book illustrations), and uploads them to GrabUp.

Once GrabUp returns a successful upload response, the code extracts the URL string and writes it to the system pasteboard. It then spawns a system process to alert the user (system("say 'You Are Ell is ready'");). Isn't that just adorable?

Here's hoping this will hold you until GrabUp becomes Snow Leopard ready!

Hugs,

Auntie T.

UPDATE: Based on suggestions by TUAW co-blogger Joachim Bean, the source and executable have been updated to use the defaults written to com.apple.screencapture, both name and path. Thanks, Joachim!