Dropper: Drop 'n' go

Dropper is a little program that I wrote that shows a little box. When you drop files onto this box, it will open those files with whatever program you have specified. It's a type of "drop box", if you will.

I would like to first and foremost thank Brother Gabriel-Marie, who e-mailed me with suggestions for PEM, one of them being a "drop box" program for use with PEM. So without him, there would be no Dropper.

So the nice thing about Dropper is how customizable it is. You can set the program, of course, but you can also set the icon to whatever you want: PNG, JPG, ICO, even an EXE icon (like the icon of the program you're using. You can also resize it to almost any size you want (although I did put a cap on the smallest being 25x25, just so you don't lose it.) You can also set the transparency, anything from completely solid, to being barely visible. The background (that is, the color behind the icon) is also customizable, even though at the moment, you have the choice of white, black, and the default windows color. Lastly, there's the option of making it Always On Top (which I recommend), and the option of Enabling/Disabling it, meaning you can't drop files onto it.

That's about it. It runs at the Autohotkey usual 3.7mb of RAM, it's only 300kb in size. It's not quite portable, as it needs a few more tweaks to be able to make paths relative, but it's getting there. It's fairly beta, at the moment, and there's many things that I want it to have, but not yet. So here's a FAQ to answer some questions you might have:

Is Dropper portable? No (even though I already discussed it). While Dropper does not require any files outside of itself, the paths you choose are not relative yet, so it won't work across different drives (yet).

Why is my image fuzzy sometimes? There are two reasons I've come across this so far. The first is if you've resized Dropper to be very small, chosen a new image, then resized. If that's the case, just restart Dropper, and it should display a full sized icon/picture. The second case is with EXEs. For some reason, Autohotkey (the language it was written in) is not very good with using icons from EXEs, and it won't use the correct size. I'm working to correct this.

Can I use a transparent background? I thought of this feature and wanted to include it (there's even the menu option), but I ran into many roadblocks along the way. So no, you can't, and until I find away to do away with all the side effects and obstacles you'll never be able to.

Can I use a moving GIF? Again, nice feature to have, but no. This is again due to limitations of Autohotkey. You can choose a moving GIF, but it will only show the first frame. GIFs may not be displayed correctly, period.

Why do some windows underneath Dropper distort when I resize it? Are you teh haxxor? Strange bug I encountered. Just minimize-restore the window. :P

As you can see, there's missing features and some bugs, but it actually functions very well. You can drop multiple files onto it, and it will handle them no problem. Also, feel free to download the source, modify it, and make your own Dropper. Just please, give credit where credit is due.

Check out Dropper Screenshots here

Visit FreewareWire Software Downloads page for Dropper v1.0