You’d have to come from a different planet not to have heard of Dropbox and its syncing simplicity that’s seduced many of us. The idea of having a place on each of your computers that keeps all your most handy files up to date is hugely attractive.

Of course the other very useful feature of Dropbox is being able to publicly share files by placing them in the public folder. This generates a download URL that anyone can follow to obtain a copy of the file.

The problem comes when you want to give someone else the public link so they can access the file. To get the URL, you need to browse to the file in your public Dropbox folder, right-click it and choose Copy public link from the Dropbox menu. You can then send the link by email or IM. Compared to global famine, this is hardly a hardship, but it does interrupt your work flow and there is a better way.

Bloodrop enables you to share a file publicly via Dropbox and to get its public link via drag and drop. Once installed in your OS X dock, simply drag and drop the file you want to share onto the Bloodrop dock application. The public link is automatically copied to the clipboard.

Installing Bloodrop is easy. Once downloaded and extracted, drag it to the dock. Launch it and enter your Dropbox ID and you're good to go - you need your Dropbox ID as it forms part of any public link you share in Dropbox.