TinyGrab 2.5 for Mac has been released, and is suggested for ALL Mac users.

It completely replaces the functionality of all previous versions, and fixes all known bugs with them.  After a long and painful detour, we’re back on track folks!

This version is now recommended for nearly all Mac users – it’s much faster, and works much better.

We believe this is a final beta before final release, and is considered very stable.  It includes all features that will be present in version 2.5 for Mac.

This version is now recommended for nearly all Mac users – it’s much faster, and works much better.

Since it is a Beta version, some things are not yet complete or will change slightly in the final release version.  We believe it to be very stable, but request your feedback on any problems, sent to support@tinygrab.com or tweeted to us @tinygrab.

New in this Release (Beta 4):

• FTP uploads
• Bug fixes – primarily related to Mac OS 10.5

Features not yet included:

• SFTP uploads
• Private / long-url grabs

If any of the features listed above are crucial for you, you should not download this version of the Beta.  They will be included in an upcoming Beta release.

This version is now recommended for nearly all Mac users – it’s much faster, and works much better.

Since it is a Beta version, some things are not yet complete or will change slightly in the final release version.  We believe it to be very stable, but request your feedback on any problems, sent to support@tinygrab.com or tweeted to us @tinygrab.

Features not yet included:

• FTP uploads
• SFTP uploads
• Private / long-url grabs

If any of the features listed above are crucial for you, you should not download this version of the Beta.  They will be included in an upcoming Beta release.

The Great Crash of 2011 was primarily due to server-related and domain-related issues, which affected everyone.  That had a cascading effect that required a very incomplete version of the TinyGrab 2.0 Client for Mac to be released, which caused completely different issues for Mac users.

Server / Cloud
To “stabilize” TinyGrab, we’ve had to address several different pieces, starting with the servers / cloud.  That’s the home-base that all applications talk to, and it must be reachable and reliable at all times.  The servers are now very reliable and working, but have a few quirks that we are in the process of fixing to solve some fringe problems that a few users are experiencing.

TinyGrab Mac Client
Next up, even though the server was reliable, most people were experiencing major problems with TinyGrab, making it virtually unusable.  For all intents and purposes, TinyGrab was still unstable for Mac.  Rather than slap a band-aid on the previous version, we undertook a complete re-write from the ground up, so it would be faster, more compatible, more stable, and easier to maintain going forward.  That re-write is nearing completion, and will make TinyGrab a much nicer experience for a huge number of Mac users.

Mobile Apps
We removed the iPhone app from the Apple store because it was buggy as well, and are in the process of rewriting that from the ground up, and can’t wait to re-release it!

After the iOS version, other mobile versions will be released shortly afterwards.

3rd Party API
There is a little-known API for TinyGrab that allows other services and developers to interact with the service.  This is largely working, and is in fact used by the TinyGrab client applications.  However, it is undocumented and has a few quirks and incomplete features that we’re finishing, so others can begin accessing the API.  Get ready!

Paid Premium Version & New Features
Much to everyone’s chagrin, the premium version of TinyGrab has been unavailable for nearly a year.  While it was buggy and unstable, we didn’t feel right about charging for it.  Now that the applications are getting back up to par, and the service is more reliable, we’re getting ready to re-release the paid version.  Along with this, we’re adding a few new features to the service.  Those features will be described when released – but they’re good!

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Thanks for bearing with us, and if you gave up, we hope you’ll come try out TinyGrab again – it’s better than ever!

New-and-improved grab.by Page

Over this past weekend, we released a new-and-improved Grab.by page that brings back some of the better parts of the very original grab page, while adding new convenience features – social sharing, view counter, and notes.

Sidebar Opened

Sidebar Closed

Mobile Compatible

In addition to being less obtrusive on standard computers, this new grab.by page is now almost fully compatible with most mobile devices as well (tablets, smart phones).  We have more optimizations coming for mobile soon, but it’s now functional for the first time.  (pro tip:  touch the little orange arrow to collapse or open the sidebar)

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This new grab.by page is published immediately and is now showing all TinyGrabs – you can see it here: http://grab.by/bnLI or with your own uploads.

But we are thrilled to announce that on July 8th, TinyGrab was acquired by development agency Company 52 and has begun a new chapter; one of stability and growth.  Since taking over 2 weeks ago, Company 52 has stabilized the service, solved nearly all of the outstanding problems that were making TinyGrab unusable, and dramatically improved customer support response time.

How does this affect TinyGrab users?  Only that TinyGrab is, and will continue to be, better than ever.  All previous purchases will be honored, current features will continue to be supported, and all previously working or incomplete / buggy features will be completed!  In addition, new feature enhancements are in the pipeline and will be coming soon.

Chris, Nick, and the TinyGrab founding team has done an outstanding job of creating the best and easiest screenshot sharing app + service.  They did such a good job that TinyGrab grew faster and bigger than they were prepared for, and they chose Company 52 from multiple offers as the best new owner to ensure TinyGrab’s long-term growth and stability.

Company 52 is a primarily US-based web and mobile application development agency.  Our small team of full-time designers and developers is geographically distributed, and has been developing very secure high-availability applications for the last 5 years.  We have already been handling all maintenance, programming, and customer support for TinyGrab since acquiring it 2 weeks ago.

As long-time users of TinyGrab, we felt the pain every other user experienced when TinyGrab became unstable.  Now that it’s stable again, we’re very excited about the new things that are in the works – including an updated iOS app with iPad support, a Windows Phone 7 app, and re-introducing premium subscription features and plans.  Oh, and there will always be a free version of TinyGrab!

If you became frustrated and gave up on TinyGrab over the last few months, we invite you to come try it out again.  We look forward to earning your trust again, and providing you great service!

Michael Poythress
CEO, Company 52

In the last few weeks, you have likely experienced several issues, including TinyGrab crashing, and the grab.by domain going offline.  All the grab.by domain issues should be resolved, and URLs in the grab.by/XYZ format should now be working at this time. More related fixes coming soon.

Also, TinyGrab Mac version 2.04 is no longer crashing, and is uploading images normally. Please let us know if problems persist with this version.

We are committed to resolving each and every outstanding issue as quickly as possible, and will provide regular updates (and more complete explanations) over the coming days.

TinyGrab 2.0 was launched in its premature state after a malicious attack at the start of April. Since then we’ve been working around the clock restoring service, getting clients out and answering your support questions. Sifting through your responses to our new and unfinished TinyGrab 2.0 client for Mac, it’s clear that many people have been having issues with it and there have even been those begging us to restore functionality to the old app; we’ve done just that. Through a lot of hard work, poking around and making squares fit into circle shaped holes we’ve managed to ‘trick’ our old Mac app into using the new TinyGrab API.

From today if you’re a TinyGrab for Mac user and you’d prefer to use our old Mac app (1.04) you can do just that. Fire up the app, log in as normal and everything should now be functioning correctly. We haven’t changed anything in the app and we’ll make it publicly available again on our downloads page. To make this happen we’ve used some Nginx magic to allow the old app to talk to the new API; something we didn’t think was possible.

We’re going to be making some drastic changes to TinyGrab over the next few weeks. Our server architecture clearly needs to be rewritten to better handle the amount of traffic that we’re experiencing. Please expect a little downtime during this period, but not much. We’re going to set up a new TinyGrab status portal, hosted externally, which will allow you to track our maintenance issues. There’s also Twitter, where we shall continually post updates about expected downtime and changes.

The reaction to the new style grab page has been largely negative. Many people dislike the sidebar, deeming it too wide. We agree. We’ve decided that we’re going to roll out a similar grab page design to a previous one, with a few minor aesthetic changes and a few more options / features.

Soon we’ll be launching our new developer API, which we aim to open up to the public. It will be interesting to see what the TinyGrab development community will be able to make with the tools that we’re going to release. We’re certainly excited by the prospect.

Things with TinyGrab have been tough recently. We’re still young, we’re still learning – but most importantly, we’re still grabbing.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder

Today we’re very pleased to announce that TinyGrab 2.0 is now available for Mac and Windows. We know it’s been a long while coming, and we’ve been a bit quiet as we’ve been developing – so from all the team, thank you for bearing with us.

It won’t be of any surprise to hear that the TinyGrab security breach, detailed in our last blog post, came as a huge blow to the team here. We know we haven’t handled the situation perfectly at times: our blog and Twitter page haven’t always been the utmost of professionalism they should have been, for a start. It is true that the original situation was not our fault, but this is of little comfort to you, and the way we handle a crisis, as many have pointed out, reflects us as a whole. So on behalf of the entire TinyGrab team, I would like to apologise for the bugs, the consequent delays in replying to support, and any perceived unprofessionalism. We’re not a PR company – at heart, we’re a bunch of young developers – and we chose to prioritise (re-)development of the app over public announcements. We stand by the decision, but promise that customer announcements will now be more frequent, more informative – and more professional.

It’s been a long time, but with TinyGrab 2.0 now launched to a state we’re happy with on both platforms, we’re proud of what we’ve done. As we add all the 2.0 features, we’re not taking a penny from customers until we’re satisfied you’re getting value for money from a Basic/Pro account. As for existing ex-Premium (now renamed Basic, to clarify) customers, we know it’s frustrating that not everything is in place. But we’re getting there, and working as hard as we can to restore a service that is better than ever before.

To those of you who have wished us well, thank you. In fact, to those of you who have emailed us in considerably more negative tones, thank you too. Between you, you have spurred us on to develop a product that meets the high expectations you rightly hold. Support is now back to normal – visit http://help.tinygrab.com/ for more information. Alternatively, our Mac developers Sam and Erin are more than happy to take specific questions on issues with Mac 2.0 (which is still officially in beta.) You can email them at sam@tinygrab.com or erin@tinygrab.com, respectively. My partner in TinyGrab, Chris Leydon, recently tweeted to say that a Windows Phone 7 app is in the early stages of development, and we have plenty of exciting updates on the way. For the next couple of weeks, TinyGrab (especially for Mac) will have several updates as we fix known bugs, and get the new/improved features out to you as soon as possible; follow @tinygrab for up-to-date information. Again, thank you for your patience. Simple Screenshot Sharing is our passion. Social Screenshot Sharing is our dream, and we know we’ll make it come true.

Nick Cooper
TinyGrab Business Officer

Over the past few days a lot of TinyGrab users will have noticed the significant drop in our usually excellent service. Many of you are frustrated with our downtime, errors and confusing messages. A few of you have fled to alternative services, some of you have even issued death threats and have tracked down my personal phone number and address to send me abusive messages (It’s a free app, come on!), now it’s time to tell you properly what’s been going on.

First of all I would like to apologise for the lack of any clear communication. We’ve been putting out fires left, right and centre and just haven’t had time to write a post to let you all know what’s been going on. Now that we’ve finally managed to hit Inbox Zero, I can finally take some time to explain everything.

Earlier this week we were the victim of a malicious attack on one of our servers. Sadly this attack was on the server where TinyGrab version 1 was hosted. Through a security hole in our old service a user was able to gain remote access and corrupt a major and significant part of our original code base (if not all of it). No user or grab data was stolen, accessed or lost during the attack, thankfully it was isolated to only one server and our databases and files are stored elsewhere. Unfortunately this rendered TinyGrab useless, we were forced to launch TinyGrab 2.0 prematurely.

Like all premature babies, TinyGrab 2.0 just wasn’t ready for mainstream usage. We’ve been working on it for a full year now, but it still needed more time to develop properly and work out all of the bugs. Because of the security breach we had to rewrite a large part of our system and applications over night. Fortunately we’d successfully launch TinyGrab 2.0 Windows a few days before the attack, so that platform was left almost untouched. However our Mac client had to be re-written into TinyGrab Mini in 12 hours, in order for users to continue to use the service.

TinyGrab Mini for Mac is a temporary fix, it’s a band aid. In order to get the app out as quickly as possible we stripped out most major functionality and allowed it to do two things; login and auto-upload. In this age of minimalism the app’s quite chic, but it’s no where near the high standards that TinyGrab typically maintains.

You’ll have noticed that over the past few days, along with TinyGrab 2.0, new features are popping up. These will be polished and further explained later, along with the desktop app for Mac.

I want to take the time to thank all of you for your continued patience and support whilst we’ve been recovering from this almost disastrous event. I would also like to thank all of the TinyGrab team; those who have been up, with me, for the past 3/4 days straight, answering your support queries, bug quashing and developing applications for you to use. All of us here at TinyGrab work on this voluntarily, none of us do this as a full time job and we don’t see any financial return out of it. The money we gain from advertising and from sales keep the servers running. We do it because we love it.

Thank you, users, for being there and keeping us going. Without you there’d be no need for TinyGrab. Thank you, team, for powering on. Together we’ve all pulled through and ought to be back up to normal capacity in a week or two.

Because every cloud has a silver lining, especially the TinyGrab one, this attack has inadvertently meant that the incredibly delayed TinyGrab 2.0 has sort of launched… It’s a pity that it’s not as polished as we wanted it to be though.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder and Project Manager.

This was an isolated problem with the API only. Your grabs and personal information are stored elsewhere, and hence are completely safe. In the interest of future safety, please ensure that you are using the latest version of TinyGrab. (Currently 2.0.x.)

Thank you for being patient with us. The situation is resolved.

Lawrence Job
TinyGrab Senior Developer

Download TinyGrab Framework for OS X

For the past two years we’ve had one reoccurring requests from other developers, open up the TinyGrab API and allow other apps to feature simple screenshot sharing. With TinyGrab 2.0 we’ve redesigned our API from the ground up in order to allow third party developers to add TinyGrab integration into their apps. Our public API isn’t quite finished yet, but we’ve got something for you to play around with in the meantime.

From today onwards developers can download and play with the TinyGrab Framework for Mac OS X. Currently this framework will allow developers to have their apps upload images to the TinyGrab service, along with basic account authorisation.

We’re working on creating frameworks for other operating systems, iOS and Windows are next up, but at the moment we’re focusing on finishing up our public API and getting our native client apps released.

You can readmore about our TinyGrab Frameworks & Plugins at http://beta.tinygrab.com/plugins.php, or download the TinyGrab Framework for Mac OS X at http://clydn.com/osxframework

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder & Project Manager

Yesterday I wrote on TinyGrab’s awkward position with the Apple iOS and Mac App Stores. It turned out to be a blog post which fell under a lot of scrutiny and attracted a lot of attention, something I actually hadn’t expected. In between now and then a lot has happened, including Steve Jobs making a clarifying statement on in app subscriptions.

To reemphasise my points from yesterday we have never had a problem with Apple wanting a cut of any sales that they help solicit. It’s completely fair enough that Apple should want and receive revenue for hosting our app and making the payment magic on their end. The issue that we had was that Apple didn’t make it possible for us to use their new In App Purchasing Subscription service to actually facilitate this and make it happen. When a user subscribes in an app, through an IAP, you’re blind. You’re not given any information on the user whatsoever and to try and solicit it from them also breaks another rule; it was an incredibly grey area and after talking with Apple directly things just weren’t any clearer at all. We need this information to tie a subscription to a TinyGrab account. We need to know which user has subscribed to TinyGrab in order to deliver their purchase to them, something that is not seemingly possible with the current system.

All of this was the case until MacRumours published an email from Steve Jobs this morning. The email simply stated that the new subscription rules applied only to apps which sold content; in other words newspapers, music apps, video sites etc. This clarification from above is certainly welcomed in open arms, but when I published my post yesterday it was an incredibly grey area and there wasn’t any clarification. When we had talked to Apple they weren’t able to shed any light on the topic and informed us of our almost certain rejection. Their reasoning for the TinyGrab app remaining in the store in its current form is because the current version was uploaded before the new terms came into effect. Steve’s email is the very first kind of clarification that we’ve had on the kind of apps that have to abide by the new terms. It appears as though Software As A Service has just been given the all clear. I had reached out to Apple again before publishing my post yesterday, but no clarification was given, just a link to Apple’s guidelines for app submission.

As I stated yesterday, if Apple’s terms prevented us from actually submitting our iPhone app to the iOS store we would simply stop officially developing and supporting it. Luckily for lots of TinyGrab users and fans it appears as though this won’t be the case. With Steve Jobs’ clarification on subscription terms and SaaS behind us, we will continue to develop the current version of TinyGrab for iPhone that we’re working on and attempt to get it into the iOS store.

TinyGrab is all about simple and social screenshot sharing. You can sign up for a free account today at TinyGrab.com and start sharing your grabs with the world in seconds. TinyGrab 2.0 development continues and we aim to have a stable early general release for Mac OS X users later on this week. Windows and iPhone users can download and sign up for a TinyGrab 2.0 Beta account at http://beta.tinygrab.com

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder & Project Manager

We love Apple, we really do. Let’s face it, without them TinyGrab just wouldn’t exist and none of us would be reading this right now; for this we’re incredibly indebted to them. The homebrew and independent app development community for OS X is wonderful and vibrant. It’s profitable and turns out amazingly good apps. Until iOS was on the scene I think it’s safe to say that the OS X development community was top dog. OS X users are also the most supportive when it comes to independent apps, unlike their Windows counterparts, they’re actually used to paying for software that doesn’t come in a box.

Right now we’re in a spot of bother. TinyGrab’s the strongest we’ve ever been. We have an incredibly tight and talented team and we’re getting ready to kick ass again, but we’ve just hit a major setback in the form of Apple’s new guidelines for subscriptions in iOS and OS X apps. As many of you know TinyGrab is actually a free app, our revenue model comes from selling premium accounts through our site. TinyGrab was one of the first apps around where you had to have an account in order to use the software. We prefer this method of buying software compared to pesky license keys for a couple of reasons. First of all it reduces piracy, you don’t get many people sharing their login details to an online service. The second reason being that you can take your TinyGrab account with you anywhere. Install the app on as many machines as you want, on as many platforms, all without additional cost. It’s fair on our users and also allows us to introduce a nifty little web based account system.

Apple would now like a slice of our pie, which is fair enough. We’re more than willing to give Apple a cut of the sales that they assist in, but we can’t. They simply won’t let us. Never mind the fact that 30% is a ridiculous amount to ask us to fork over, considering that we already pay $99 a year for the privilege to develop apps for the Mac App Store and a further $99 a year to develop apps for the iOS store. Never mind that Apple also get a cut of any revenue that we generate from selling our apps through their stores, they now want in on our account and subscription service. However by doing this they’ve just prevented and locked us out of ever being able to introduce the TinyGrab app into the Mac App Store, as well as not being able to ship updates to the TinyGrab iPhone app. Here’s why…

Remember that account system we sell via TinyGrab.com? Well if you’re a paying customer it actually unlocks features in the app which are closed off to free users. These are features like FTP uploads. Infringement Number 1:

“Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality with mechanisms other than the App Store, except as approved in section 11.13, will be rejected”

We currently sell our accounts from TinyGrab.com through PayPal. We can’t actually use Apple’s In App Purchasing system because they won’t pass on a user’s data to us, they also prevent you from purchasing goods that exist outside of the app and the app store. So, for example, it prevents you from actually buying a TinyGrab account because the account is a real world purchase and doesn’t lay within the jurisdiction of Apple. Infringement Numbers 2 & 3.

“Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected”

“Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the application will be rejected”

The move to TinyGrab 2.0 will see accounts that expire after a limited time if you don’t renew your subscription. Infringement Number 4.

“Apps containing “rental” content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected”

And the final infringements are, of course, about the IAP revenue split.

“Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchasing content to be used in the app, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected”

“Apps offering subscriptions must do so using IAP, Apple will share the same 70/30 revenue split with developers for these purchases, as set forth in the Developer Program License Agreement.”

You might think that these are simple issues to fix, but we can’t actually fix them all. We can’t provide a free TinyGrab version in the app store and then sell a version on our site, because you still require an account to login. Apple wants a slice of that pie and we can’t give it to them; in other words they’ve locked us out.

We really want to be part of the app revolution on OS X and iOS but it looks as though that may no longer be able to happen, until Apple fix these issues and welcome us in again. I’m sad to say that as of today we can no longer provide development support to iOS, officially, through the app store. Until Apple loosen up on their restrictions we’re ceasing all active development on TinyGrab for iPhone. Please don’t see this as a punishment, we hate to have to do this to our users, but we’ve been fenced out. Today I’m also having to announce that TinyGrab also won’t be seen in the Mac App Store. Unfortunately we can’t be a part of this wonderful purchasing platform for the same reasons that we can no longer officially support TinyGrab for iPhone.

Luckily for TinyGrab for Mac users we still have TinyGrab.com and Apple haven’t, yet, prevented anyone from downloading apps from the world wide web and installing them on their Macs without the Mac App Store. So we aren’t going anywhere just yet. In fact we’re even trying to get a stable version of TinyGrab 2.0 for Mac out this week.

Apple’s new stance on subscriptions and accounts in applications is incredibly disappointing. At the moment we’re working incredibly closely with Intel to get TinyGrab for Windows onto their AppUp store. Intel have been incredibly friendly and helpful, they currently don’t have a subscription model in place but still allow us to have our app on their store and sell TinyGrab accounts through our own site. When they introduce a subscription service we’ll more than happily switch our payment system over in order to give Intel their fair share of any sales we make. I’m incredibly happy to be working with a company that is actively encouraging and working closely with developers in order to get it right. Apple’s new greedy model doesn’t just affect the developers of applications, it also has a horrible adverse effect on end users.

We love all of our supporters and all of our users. Thank you for continuing to use TinyGrab and for being the best community we could ever hope for. We promise to keep developing the best simple and social screenshot sharing service for Mac, Windows and whatever new platforms tickle our fancy.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

Integration is something that we’ve become very keen and focused on here at TinyGrab over the past few months. We believe that in order to be able to give you the best screenshot sharing experience around, and true value for your money, we need to be everywhere. Today sees our very first ever TinyGrab plugin for a third-party application, Courier.

Courier is one of the ultimate uploading and sharing apps for the Mac and is developed by our friends over at Real Mac Software. The TinyGrab destination plugin for Courier allows you to upload multiple photos, screenshots and other images to your TinyGrab account at once and in batch. Incredibly handy if you’re working on that new awesome web design and you have a few pages to show off.

Over the next few months we aim to open up our API to third party developers, so that they can incorporate TinyGrab into their apps and hopefully we can grow a vibrant community around plugins and extensions of our service. Courier is only the first step, if you have any suggestions as to any other services and applications you’d like to see us support please email info@tinygrab.com.

You can download the TinyGrab for Courier plugin for free at http://clydn.com/courier

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

February, the shortest month of the year. We’re great fans of short things here at TinyGrab, in fact it’s what started us out on this whole journey to begin with. Share your grabs with a short/tiny URL. However, sweet things tend to come in short bursts and we hope that February will give you sweet things in the form of TinyGrab.

Many of you will know of our now almost comical delay in launching TinyGrab 2.0 but you won’t have to wait for much longer. We’ve finished TinyGrab 2.0 for Windows, TinyGrab 2.0 for iPhone has been in the app store since December and this week the finishing touches are being put on the new TinyGrab 2.0 site… but what about TinyGrab 2.0 for Mac? It’s no secret that we’ve been plagued with development issues for everyone’s favourite and oldest TinyGrab app, but that all changed at the start of January.

Since the start of 2011 we’ve had two new team members join TinyGrab, which has greatly helped us in improving development speed. Erin Kennedy is our new Mac OS X developer, whilst Sam Gray has joined as our intern and plugin developer. Together they’ve both been working on getting a version of TinyGrab 2.0 for Mac ready to ship by the end of February, as well as a plugin for the Real Mac Software app “Courier“.

Sometime over the next few weeks we’ll be making existing TinyGrab accounts “TinyGrab 2.0 Ready”, meaning that they’ll be able to upgrade to the new system automagically when they login with a TinyGrab 2.0 enabled application. We’ll also be announcing the winners of our “How Do You Use TinyGrab?” contest.

In other news, February has also seen us switch advertising partners. We’ve left our friends and colleagues from Yoggrt Ads, to join the team over at Ad Packs, by Buy Sell Ads. We’re incredibly excited to be on this new programme and we look forward to working together for the foreseeable future!

Thank you all, as always, for sticking with us over these messy past few months. Good things come to those who wait, and we’re certainly aware that you’ve been waiting for a long time.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager

TinyGrab for iPhone is the best way to share screenshots and pictures on the go, simply and socially. TinyGrab for iPhone first made its debut in the iTunes App Store last May, over the Christmas Holidays TinyGrab 2.0 for iPhone was released. Today we’re making TinyGrab for iPhone a FREE app for everyone in the iTunes App Store. This isn’t a one off promotion, this is our new price point. We believe that everyone should be allowed to have social screeenshot sharing on the go. A TinyGrab account is still required to use the app, but it’s incredibly easy to sign up for a free (or Premium) account at http://tinygrab.com/register.

TinyGrab for iPhone 2.0 adds social screenshot sharing to the existing iPhone app, with Twitter and Facebook integration; along with uploading directly to your own FTP server and synchronising your recent uploads with your desktop TinyGrab 2.0 clients.

Available today through the iTunes App Store, TinyGrab for iPhone 2.0 is a free download for everyone. We hope that this will encourage more people to adopt simple screenshot sharing on the go.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager

Enter the ‘How I Use TinyGrab’ Competition

How do you use TinyGrab and what do you use TinyGrab for? Simple enough question, but it’s one that we’d love to know the answer to.

As I’m sure you’re aware by now we’re rebuilding TinyGrab. Part of that process involves a site refresh and we’re looking into building usage scenarios. We could make something up about how we think you use TinyGrab, but we believe it would be so much better to discover how exactly our users use our app in a day to day basis. We think we have a pretty good idea already, but we may be pleasantly surprised!

To thank you all of you who give us feedback we’re turning this into a small competition. We’re going to give away a 1 year TinyGrab 2.0 Pro subscription to the 5 best answers we get. We’ll decide the winners over the next few weeks and we’ll make the final winning announcement here on our blog, as well as notifying you by email.

To enter the competition all you have to do is visit http://tinygrab.com/iuse tell us your email address and fill out the really simple box telling us how and why you use TinyGrab!

Good luck and thanks, in advance, for all of the feedback!

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager

Please Note: The judge’s decision is final, multiple entries are allowed, the competition is available to a global audience. No cash alternative. 1 Year TinyGrab 2.0 Pro subscription refers to the new TinyGrab account pricing tier. The Pro account will become available when TinyGrab 2.0 launches a retail / sellable version.

“That’s all great, but how much will it cost?”, “I’ve already bought TinyGrab, will I have to pay AGAIN?“, questions that need answering. Hopefully this post will be able to answer all of your questions.

We’re incredibly grateful to all of our customers, users and fans, without you none of TinyGrab would have been possible. We want to be able to give you some shiny new toys to play with, to say thank you, but we also need to think about the future of TinyGrab; we need to pay the bills and keep the fridge stocked. So this is how pricing is going to work. Currently we have a two tier system, TinyGrab Free and TinyGrab Premium. TinyGrab Free is, well, free. TinyGrab Premium currently costs £10 and will give you unlimited lifetime of service access to the service. With TinyGrab 2.0 we’re renaming TinyGrab Premium and calling it TinyGrab Basic; we’re also adding a new and third tier called TinyGrab Pro. Anyone who currently has a TinyGrab Premium license will automatically switch to a TinyGrab Basic license when we turn on TinyGrab 2.0; there will be no extra charge for this. However, we’re scrapping the one time fee approach and moving towards a renewing annual subscription model instead. The new tiers/plans of service and how much they cost are in the chart below:

As you can see, TinyGrab Premium/Basic is going under a price cut and TinyGrab Pro will retail for the same price. Now, time to squash all of those questions you have about being an existing TinyGrab Premium user. If you have purchased TinyGrab Premium, or received a license through the MacHeist/other promotion, then your account will switch to TinyGrab Basic. HOWEVER we promised you that your license would be for the duration of the lifetime of the TinyGrab service, it still will be. Your account will switch to TinyGrab Basic at NO EXTRA charge and we will NOT be charging you annually for continuing to use TinyGrab. We want to reward your loyalty, not punish you. It’s only fair, right?

We’re still working out details for promotions / trials / upgrade plans, but the chart you see above is the new pricing tier plan for TinyGrab 2.0 and a list of the features that you will get with each account. We’ve worked really hard on this and hopefully we’ll have your full support and backing. Please do let us know what you think to the new pricing structure and change.

Best wishes,

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager

Silence and secrecy is not something that we’re known for at TinyGrab. However with the recent TinyGrab 2.0 news and updates we’ve shrouded ourselves in a cloak of mystery, it’s time to step out a little bit and let you know what’s going on.

Development of TinyGrab 2.0 is about a month and a half behind schedule. There’s no hiding or denying that. We originally planned to launch a big beta testing programme on September 20th, but didn’t quite manage it. Allow me to explain to you the reasoning behind this.

TinyGrab 2.0 is a completely new system, built from the ground up. We have a brand new API and a completely new database system, because of this we need to completely overhaul our apps and the way that they work with our service. Every TinyGrab app has had to be rewritten to work with the new API and this is where the delay in development has taken place. We want to ship all of our new TinyGrab 2.0 apps at the same time, but some apps are easier to rewrite than others.

This week we are going to ship an open beta of TinyGrab 2.0, but a warning comes with this. Once you start using a TinyGrab 2.0 enabled app, you cannot switch back to the old system. It’s not possible. This is because when you first authenticate your account with a TinyGrab 2.0 app, we run a migration script to transfer your data from TinyGrab 1 to the TinyGrab 2.0 service. Our panel is pretty much ready to go and some of our apps are bursting at the seams with new features, unfortunately it’s not the grand launch we wanted to have.

Last week TinyGrab hosted a TinyGrab 2.0 launch party in London. The purpose of this party was to celebrate the hard work of the development team and to give the UK tech press a sneak peek of what’s to come. Now that we’re happy with the reaction that we received at the party and that the apps are stabling out, we’re ready to invite you to see and test TinyGrab 2.0 for yourselves.

I must thank you all for your patience and continued support through this troubling technical time. Let’s get ready to kick some ass.

Some of the features that you’ve requested for TinyGrab 2.0 that we’re going to roll out over the next week are as follows.

• A better way to manage grabs with thumbnails / a completely overhauled Control Panel system.
• Online folders / groups for your grabs.
• Custom URLs for grabs. IE http://g.clydn.com/b4dg
• SFTP, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files uploading support.
• The ability to upload any file to your own server, with a short filename.
• A new iPhone app with Facebook and Twitter sharing.

There are plenty more features that we’re working on getting ready and out over the next month, so for this period of time that we’re calling the ‘Open Beta’, we’re inviting all TinyGrab customers to upgrade their accounts to TinyGrab 2.0 Pro accounts for free. When the Open Beta is over you’ll roll back to your original account type, but we have a feeling you may want to pay the reduced subscription to upgrade to get all of the TinyGrab 2.0 features again.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager

Book TinyGrab Launch Party Tickets

OK, OK, we’ve listened to you. You were going to buy TinyGrab 2.0 anyway (naturally.) So why charge for the party? And we agree. So the TinyGrab 2.0 Launch Party is now at a new, fresh price of: FREE!

Everything we promised you yesterday is still happening: obviously there’s no free Pro licence for your money, but you no longer have to pay so that’s fine! Pro licences can be bought on the night, so bring your cash anyway and have a great evening on TinyGrab!

We really look forward to seeing you there. All we ask is that you sign up on Eventbrite (http://tinygrab.eventbrite.com) – only people who are registered to attend will be allowed into this exclusive event. Come celebrate 2.0 with the team!

Nick Cooper
Partner in TinyGrab

Book TinyGrab Launch Party Tickets

TinyGrab 2.0 is coming. And to commemorate this new stage in social screenshot sharing, we at TinyGrab want to invite you to our 2.0 Launch Party!

On Friday 29th October in London, we are coming together to celebrate the culmination of months of effort from everyone on the TinyGrab team. From just £11, you can be there with us. So, what have we got for you?

• Entry to a Central London venue
• Two great bands and a DJ, for a fun-packed evening
• FREE FOOD!
• Freebies from TinyGrab
• The chance to meet all the team!

Enticed you yet? If not, how about if we tell you that the price of the ticket includes… a year’s Pro licence for TinyGrab 2.0! So your £11 not only gets you a great night out – you also save £10 on a TinyGrab licence, and become one of the first people to experience the future of social screenshot sharing.

BUT be quick. Tickets are only £11 until September 30th, after which they will be £15. So, if you don’t want to miss out on a great evening out with TinyGrab, as well as a FREE Pro licence for a year, get your ticket now! – http://tinygrab.eventbrite.com

Further details will follow, but the Launch Party will be held at Drop East, a fantastic newly-refurbished venue in Shoreditch, Central London – just a short walk from Liverpool Street or Aldgate East stations. As mentioned above, food will be provided – and the venue is fully licensed so everyone can have a great evening! As a result, the event is for over-18s only, unless special arrangements can be made with either myself or Chris Leydon before hand; please do let us know if you’re 18 and want to come.

Book TinyGrab Launch Party Tickets

We look forward to seeing you there!

Nick Cooper
TinyGrab Partner

Sign up for the TinyGrab Beta at http://tinygrab.com/beta

We’ve been very quiet at TinyGrab over the summer. To some it may seem as though we’ve thrown in the towel and given up. It’s time to dispel these rumours. It’s time to show you what we’ve been up to. It’s time to launch the TinyGrab 2.0 beta!

TinyGrab 2.0 was originally announced in April this year - we were aiming to have launched the new service by late June / early July, but unfortunately this didn’t come to fruition. There are a number of reasons why our 2.0 launch has been delayed: we’ve had a mass team shakeup and we’ve completely rewritten the entire TinyGrab system from the ground up. TinyGrab v1, to put it simply, just can’t scale. All of the issues that currently affect TinyGrab arise because the original TinyGrab system was built to cope with around 3,000 users. When we launched TinyGrab in July 2009 we had no idea the amount of critical success that we’d have. TinyGrab 2.0 has been written with scalability in mind. We can quickly add new features to the new system without having to break it, or take it offline, every few weeks or so. TinyGrab 2.0 is the system that we envisioned right from the start.

Our web service isn’t the only part which has undergone a rewrite – so have our desktop apps. In terms of UX there have been so many changes since we last updated our apps. New apps are coming out regularly, apps which change the game space in terms of UX; we’ve had to take account of this and build these changes into our own apps. Every single user request for TinyGrab has been listened to, weighed up and we’re proud to say you’ll find most of them in the new system.

Today we’re launching the TinyGrab 2.0 beta. TinyGrab v1 was all about simple screenshot sharing; TinyGrab 2.0 is social screenshot sharing. We’re looking for the best beta testers out there – we don’t want those who are going to use it once or twice, we need passionate people who can provide us with helpful feedback. If you think you’ve got what it takes to join the TinyGrab 2.0 beta team sign up for an invite over at http://tinygrab.com/beta – if we think you’ve got what it takes to handle the next generation of screenshot sharing, we’ll shoot you an invite to our super secret beta.

The system is still buggy in places, so we’re starting out with a very small testing team. Don’t be offended if you don’t get an invite right away – we just want to make sure that everything works.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be sending out beta invites to those who signup to the TinyGrab 2.0 beta list, as well as revealing new features, giving video guides and announcing pricing plans / changes. It’s going to be an exciting month for TinyGrab!

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

For Release on August 2nd 2010

Worcester, 02.08.2010

Keyone Productions is today pleased to announce that TinyGrab, the application offering simple screenshot sharing to over 300,000 users, will be sponsoring the Worcester CAMRA 11th Beer, Cider & Perry Festival from 12th-14th August 2010.

The Worcester Beer, Cider & Perry Festival is an annual event held at Worcester Racecourse, now in its eleventh year. The event is extremely popular: demand has exceeded supply in previous years, and with over 10,000 expected to attend this year, TinyGrab is proud to play a part in helping this local event to succeed.

TinyGrab, available at www.tinygrab.com utilises inbuilt technology on Mac OS X 10.5, Windows and iPhone to enable users to capture an image on their screen, and have it instantly uploaded to the Internet. From there, the user is given a URL automatically copied to the clipboard- making it easy to share with others. The application recently celebrated its first birthday, and with the iPhone app at the low price of £1.79 ($2.99), and Premium accounts enabling unlimited uploads and uploads to FTP servers available for £10, not to mention high levels of customer-reported satisfaction with the program; TinyGrab’s success is expected to continue into its second year.

Nick Cooper, partner in Keyone Productions, today said: ‘We are really pleased to sponsor and be part of the Worcester Beer, Cider and Perry Festival. Keyone Productions has always enjoyed partnering with local organisations, and this is a great opportunity for us to do exactly this.’

Chris Leydon, partner in Keyone Productions, today said: ʻPromotion is starting to gear up with TinyGrab as we look forward to launching our refreshed service in TinyGrab 2.0. We’ve been working very hard behind the scenes now for the past few months and we really want the whole world to be able to take notice of what’s to come.ʼ

TinyGrab for iPhone and premium accounts are now available. For more information, and to download the program, visit the iPhone app store, www.tinygrab.com, or email the TinyGrab team at info@tinygrab.com.

Keyone Productions is a creative digital media business specialising in creating online media content for our target audiences. Established in March 2006, and operated by the partnership of Chris Leydon and Nick Cooper, Keyone Productions has previously focused on high-quality film production and the creation of commercial promotional content, but is now adding web design and development to its extensive portfolio. Further information on the business is available at www.keyoneproductions.co.uk.

Nick Cooper, Partner in TinyGrab.

–ENDS—

TinyGrab for iPhone successfully launched at the end of May, way ahead of schedule and I would personally like to thank everyone involved in the development and testing of the app, as well as those who have purchased it. TinyGrab for iPhone allows you to quickly share photos and screenshots taken with your iPhone, in a very similar vein to TinyGrab for desktop. We’re working hard on a few updates which will include FTP support, multiple file sizes and a social aspect; as well as iOS 4.0 support. You can purchase TinyGrab for iPhone from the iTunes App Store.

It’s been a while since we talked about TinyGrab 2.0, so let me fill in the gaps for you. We were hoping for an alpha / beta phase at the end of June / start of July. However we’ve had a little setback by about a month or so. Nevertheless you can see the clear progress that we’ve been making. We’ve introduced a new grab page, with our new ad partners Yoggrt, as well as launched our freshly redesigned site. The new TinyGrab Control Panel looks good to ship by the end of the month along with the new and updated apps. This is the TinyGrab 2.0 that we keep alluding to, social screenshot sharing.

Please keep your eyes peeled on our Twitter account, as well as this blog for any important service announcements and updates. We thank you for your patience and continued loyalty.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

Last week was a very tough week for all of us here at TinyGrab. We were faced with the possibility of closure and an ever increasing debt. On Friday we made an announcement and an appeal to our users. We never expected the kind of response that we got.

First of all I would like to say a special thank you to you, our users. Without you TinyGrab wouldn’t even be possible and to see you all pitch together to work and save something that you obviously care about is uplifting and wonderful. So far we’ve received around £300 in donations from our users. Whilst this isn’t enough to retire on, it is keeping us afloat so I must thank you all.

Secondly, two organisations stepped in last week to help TinyGrab and to stop us from going under. The first organisation that I’d like to thank is MacHeist. Some of you might remember that TinyGrab was part of the first MacHeist nanoBundle, in fact it’s where most of our users have come from. MacHeist gave away over 300,000 free TinyGrab licenses as part of their weekly promotion back in November. When the powers that be at MacHeist heard about our situation they stepped in to extend to us a loan. This loan will be able to fund TinyGrab development for at least another two to three months. It’s enough to get TinyGrab 2.0 out of the door at least. So to MacHeist I would like to say a very big personal thank you and promise to pay them back within due course.

Last but by no means least I would like to thank the Rackspace Cloud. When we discovered early last week that Zero Two Studios was being liquidated and we’d never see our advertising money, we reached out to Lew Moorman and Odus Wittenburg at the Rackspace Cloud. TinyGrab is powered completely by the Rackspace Cloud; our servers are Cloud Servers and all of the grabs are stored on Cloud Files. Due to some early 2.0 development work and getting over 1.5 million grabs onto Cloud Files, we’d built up quite the hosting bill. On Friday evening I received an email from Rob LaGesse; Rackspace Cloud were going to waive our current hosting bill in exchange for a few links dotted around the TinyGrab site. Naturally we’ve taken Rackspace up on this offer. We are now working closely with Cameron Nouri and the rest of the wonderful team over at Rackspace Cloud to reduce TinyGrab’s hosting bill even further. In addition to the Rackspace Cloud logo in the footer of TinyGrab web pages, we have included them in ad rotation on our grab pages.

Thank you to everyone who donated, spread the word and offered support during these troubling times. They’re not quite over yet but hopefully there aren’t any upcoming storms for a while. Keep your eyes peeled this week for announcements concerning advertising on TinyGrab and our iPhone client.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

TinyGrab was always designed to help the community. Today we’re asking the community to help us.

As you may or may not have been aware, TinyGrab recently entered into agreement with an advertising business named Zero Two Productions: an agreement involving the difficult decision to bring adverts onto TinyGrab, but one that would guarantee the security of TinyGrab for many months, if not years. We did not enter into this agreement lightly, and although Zero Two Studios was a small business, so is TinyGrab and the community of small internet businesses is the community we want to associate ourselves with.

Despite adverts being on our website for almost a fortnight, a bank transfer of promised payment for this advertising never reached our account. We were told yesterday that Zero Two Studios’ parent company was to be liquidated, and its owner to be declared bankrupt. Whether this is the case or not, we will have to see, and in the interests of future legal action we are considering against the company and its owner, it is perhaps not wise to comment further at this point. The gist is this. We have been let down, and in the process, we have let our customers down. For the slow image loading, the problems with embedded images and of course the adverts being there for nothing, everyone at TinyGrab would like to take this opportunity to humbly apologise for how things have turned out.

What we don’t apologise for, however, is our dream. All we wanted was to bring social screenshot sharing to the community and from the praise and comments we receive from you, we believe and hope you share our dream. TinyGrab is nevertheless a business. As much as we would like to, neither Chris nor I can afford to pump hundreds of pounds into TinyGrab every month with no visible sign of return. We wish that we could, but we can’t. This is why we are extending our hand to you, the hundreds of thousands of loyal TinyGrab users. It is no exaggeration to say that without your support, we will have no option but to suspend TinyGrab’s operations within the next two months – killing the dream, and letting you down more than we have already.

We’re basically asking for donations. If you love the product, as we know so many of you do, please demonstrate this love with a small donation to keep the program in business. Our friends at MacHeist have helped us enormously in the short-term, a deal for which we are eternally grateful. For the 300,000 of you who were lucky enough to get a free Premium account through MacHeist, it is you to whom we turn. If just 1% of our MacHeist customers donate just £2 ($3), this would keep TinyGrab afloat for almost another year. And that’s just 1% of you, for the price of a beer. Think what we could all do as a community. In a ceremonial offer, Chris and I have already thrown £2 into the pot: we’re as much reliant on TinyGrab as a fantastic program as you are. To donate, just click the Donate button at the bottom of this post, in the sidebar or on our home page at http://tinygrab.com.

The future of TinyGrab could be great for us all. TinyGrab 2.0 is ready and waiting, the iPhone app is on the cusp of launch, and a fresh new website is in planning; all of which will hopefully entice new customers and let TinyGrab pay for itself. We’ve shared our images, we’ve shared our lives. Now let’s share what we have to keep TinyGrab, and the dream, alive.

Nick Cooper
Partner in TinyGrab.

TinyGrab officially launched in July 2009, when it launched it offered a service like no other. A reliable screenshot sharing platform, that was mysteriously ad free. April 2010 and we’re still a reliable screenshot sharing platform. However, due to the changing ways of business and the internet TinyGrab will start implementing ads into its system.

We are partnering with Zero Two Studios to provide high quality, non-intrusive and appealing adverts on grab pages. Starting Monday 3rd of May all short TinyGrab links/uploads will display their content in HTML pages. There will be a small discreet header, with the TinyGrab logo and a non-intrusive advert in the top right hand corner. We are not shrinking your grabs or altering your image, we are changing the way that it is initially displayed. Images shared with TinyGrab’s long URL will still point directly to your grab as an image and not a web page. Adverts will be displayed on all short TinyGrab URLs, although Premium members will have an option to disable this default and turn ads off. We would like to encourage those who received TinyGrab Premium, for free, from MacHeist to consider leaving the default option of ads enabled, in order to help support TinyGrab.

The decision to insert ads onto our platform was not an easy one to make, however we believe that it is crucial to the further development and continued operational service of TinyGrab. The revenue generated from displaying ads on grabs will go straight back into TinyGrab, funding further development and allowing TinyGrab 2.0 to be truly great.

If you would like to advertise your brand, or product, on TinyGrab please contact Zero Two Studios by visiting http://zerotwostudios.com/tinygrab.

Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Project Manager.

TinyGrab is all about simple screenshot sharing. It has quickly become one of the most popular creative file sharing apps for Mac, Windows and soon to be iPhone.

It’s been just over a year since the first tests started with TinyGrab and it’s safe to say that we’ve certainly come a long way since then. TinyGrab started life as a test, it was originally intended to be an application for a small group of friends to share images with each other, quickly. When we launched the open beta for TinyGrab we had no idea of the kind of overwhelming response we’d receive. Simple screenshot sharing was the tagline that we used to launch TinyGrab back in July 2009; 10 months on we’re reflecting on our motto and the direction which we want to continue in. Fear not, we are remaining loyal to the screenshots which have served us so well.

Over the past year that TinyGrab has been operating we have seen the rise and fall of some giants in our market. Recently there has been a lot of competition for TinyGrab opening up in similar spaces; however these apps attempt to cater for all file uploading needs, as opposed to focusing on one aspect and doing it really well. TinyGrab has been focused on screenshot sharing for the past year and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It would be foolish of us to think that our small team could compete in the very crowded market of multiple file-type sharing; our resources would be stretched too thin and we just wouldn’t be able to do an adequate job. TinyGrab is completely focused on being the best in the screenshot sharing market, something that we believe we’re just not at yet.

Today we’re announcing, officially, our plans for TinyGrab 2.0. We’re going through a complete rewrite. Out with the old system and in with the new. The web interface is currently undergoing a huge redesign, API a complete haul over and the apps have some exciting new features coming to them. We’re not quite ready to throw all of our cards down onto the table just yet, but we still have a few things up our sleeve.

TinyGrab 2.0: Social. Screenshot. Sharing

Chris Leydon.

TinyGrab Project Manager.