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alternate clickbaity title: the update I learned Swift and SwiftUI for.

I’m happy to announce Yoink for Mac v3.6.5’s immediate availability.
In addition to numerous quality-of-life improvements and adjustments, this update re-introduces the (judging from the inquiries I received about it) beloved Clipboard History feature, and its widget.

What’s Yoink?

Yoink offers you a temporary place (a “shelf”) for files you drag from Finder, or app-content like images from websites. It frees your hand and mouse cursor to let you more easily and quickly navigate to the destination of your files.

Yoink automatically appears at the edge of your screen when you start a drag a file, allowing you to place it there.

What’s New in Yoink v3.6.5?

Let’s talk about the most important thing first – the resurrected clipboard history and its widget.
Up until earlier this year, I had virtually no experience with Swift, let alone SwiftUI, and I was pretty happy to continue with my Objective-anCient ways.
But I realized it held me back. Things are clearly moving away from Objective-C and towards Swift, so at the beginning of this year (2022), I made a point of learning the basics of Swift as quickly as possible to have the option of using everything Apple’s platforms and APIs have to offer.

With macOS Big Sur, Apple got rid of its old-style Today Widgets (which could be written in Objective-C and a nice .xib-interface file) and brought over the new SwiftUI-style widgets from iOS. That’s why Yoink’s widget had been defunct for so long – I didn’t have the skills to replace it.

But enough chit-chat, here’s the nitty-gritty!

While the clipboard history recording still happens in Yoink itself in the background, the widget provides quick access to previous copies.
It comes in two sizes: medium and large.
The medium widget shows up to 6 copied objects, the large one up to 12.

Widget Configurability

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but you can have multiple widgets, and they can be configured to show
1) the most recent copies (medium: 1-6, large: 1-12)
2) older copies (medium: 7-12, large: 13-24)
3) oldest copies (medium: 13-18, large: 25-36)

So you can, for example, have one large and one medium widget to show the last 18 copied items, or three large widgets to show the last 36 copied items.

Apart from that, you can have the widget show only particular data types:

1) Only copied images
2) Only copied text
3) Only copied links
4) Only copied files
5) All copied items
6) Only pinned copies (pinning copied items is new in Yoink v3.6.5)

That allows the widget to be very flexible and useful.

How to use the Widget (Widget Clicks and Tricks)

– Click on an item in the widget, and it is copied to your clipboard
– Option(⌥)-click on an item, and it gets sent to Yoink so you can drag it out at a later time
– Shift(⇧)-click on an item, and it gets pinned (new in v3.6.5)
– Command(⌘)-click on an item, and it is revealed in the Clipboard History Browser (new in v3.6.5)

Pinning Items (new in v3.6.5)
A pinned item in the widget

When the Clipboard History reaches its threshold (up to 36 items), it will begin clearing out the oldest copies to make place for new ones.
In some cases, you might want to hold on to items indefinitely. That’s why you can now pin them. A pinned item will not be cleared out, unless you unpin it or delete it manually.

Clipboard History Browser (new in v3.6.5)

The history browser gives you a simple way to organize your copied items. Pin, unpin, delete, send to Yoink, copy, or clear out the entire history.

If you’d like to learn more about some of the implementation details behind this new widget, here’s a blog post for you.

What else is new in Yoink v3.6.5?

– It raises the minimum system requirements from macOS 10.10 Yosemite to macOS 10.12 Sierra.
– Instead of a TIFF file, a PNG file is created when pasting image data into Yoink.
In that vain, Yoink also transparently provides PNG and JPEG data when dragging out images of the types HEIC, HEIF or TIFF to broaden compatibility with other apps.
– It also fixes a couple of bugs and improves compatibility with, among other apps, DEVONthink, where items dragged from DEVONthink to Yoink and then out of Yoink are no longer moved, but copied, to ensure the integrity of DEVONthink’s files database.

What do I need to use Yoink for Mac?

Yoink runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and requires macOS Sierra 10.12 or newer.
It’s localized in English, German, French, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

Where can I get Yoink?

Free Demo (direct download, ~28 MB, 30 days, notarized by Apple)
Mac App Store ($7.99, one-time purchase, no in-app purchases, update free for existing customers, as it’s been the case since v1.0)
Mac Productivity Bundle (Mac App Store, 25% off Yoink, Transloader and ScreenFloat)
Setapp (subscription service with over 200 Mac apps)

Yoink is also available for iPad and iPhone

For members of the press or anyone else who is interested, here’s a press kit.

I hope you like the update. If you have any feedback or questions, please do not hesitate to write me – I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Enjoy 😊

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In System Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects, users have the choice to turn off user interface sound effects (as an example, that might be a “tick” sound when adjusting a slider, or a “lock/unlock” sound when clicking a Lock button).

But how do you respect that setting? NSSound surely doesn’t.
Well, I found two ways to do it:

The “Easy” Way

macOS has a key in the standard UserDefaults object

com.apple.sound.uiaudio.enabled

If it is present and set to true, it’s safe to play the ui sound.

The “Safe” Way

What if the UserDefaults key isn’t present? Or you just want to be absolutely certain that your sound respects the user’s setting?

Use the AudioToolbox APIs. It offers

AudioServicesSetProperty(kAudioServicesPropertyIsUISound,...)

which marks sounds as UI sounds, thus not playing if the user wishes them not to.

It’s a bit more work, but might be the safer way to do it.

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I’ve just published an update to BackLog, my freeware developer tool that lets you comfortably retrieve logs from your – or someone else’s, using custom URL schemes – Mac’s log archives.

What’s New
  • Checks for admin privileges at launch
  • Adds a simple update mechanism
  • The optional instructions you can send to users can now be copied in English or German (if you’d like to help translate them, please mail me – thank you!)
  • The sound that plays when retrieving logs completes now respects the “Play user interface sound effects” in System Preferences > Sound is enabled
Availability

BackLog is a freeware app, so if you like it, please take a look at my other apps – thank you!

It requires macOS 10.15 or newer and is currently available in English and German.
It needs to be run from a user with admin privileges (or using ‘sudo’ – user discretion advised).

Due to APIs it uses (OSLogStore), it does not run in the macOS sandbox, but it’s notarized by Apple and runs in the Hardened Runtime environment. When checking for updates (manually started), it connects to eternalstorms.at. Other than that, your internet connection is not used.

It runs natively on both Apple Silicon- and Intel Macs.

Website
Download (831 KB, zip)

If you find the app useful, please check out my other apps I offer for purchase on the App Stores – I’d appreciate it tons.

Enjoy 😊

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I’m happy to announce the release of a new freeware app: BackLog.

The premise is simple:
It’s complicated, or at least cumbersome, to get logs that predate you clicking “Start streaming” in Console.app – Apple’s recommendation for it is to *create an entire system diagnostics report* and look for files in there. Madness.
I wanted a quick and easy way to, for example, get all log entries from all processes that happened from boot time to 5 minutes after. And that’s what this app lets me – and now, you – do.

Hello BackLog
BackLog, showing all log entries from boot-time to 4 seconds after boot-time.

Using BackLog is pretty straight-forward. Select the process you’re interested in, specify a time-range and an optional text-filter and hit Load Logs.
You can then select it all and copy-paste it somewhere, or hit the little Share button at the lower left to share it as a file.

For convenience, right-click the ‘from’ or ‘to’ date pickers and select a time from the contextual menu, like Boot time.
What makes it a Developer Tool?

While diagnostic logs might appear to be of interest mostly to developers, a simple logging-app is not a developer tool to me, per-se.
What really makes BackLog such a tool, in my opinion, is that developers can create backlog:// links which they can send to their customers, and, when they have the app installed and click that link, all the options (like process, date range and message type) will be set for them beforehand – no hassle. All the customer has to do is hit Load Logs and send the results back to the developer.

Numerous times I’ve had to deal with obscure app-sandbox or keychain access issues in Yoink, and having to tell customers to please open Console, filter for Yoink, and then (hopefully) reproduce the issue is just bad UX.
Now, I can send them this app with a backlog:// link, with a time range pre-defined, and all they have to do is copy-paste the results into a response to my mail. And best of all – they don’t have to reproduce anything, the logs already contain all the info I need from the last time the issue occurred.

You can either copy only the backlog:// link, or have it include pre-written instructions for your customers.
Links and Further Info

BackLog is and will be Freeware. If you like it, however, I’d like to ask you to take a look at my other apps I offer for purchase on the App Stores – thank you 🙂

The app requires macOS 10.15 or newer and is localized – for now – in English and German.
It’s sadly not sandboxed, because the OSLogStore APIs won’t work in the sandbox environment 🤦‍♂️.
But Hardened Runtime is enabled, and it’s been notarized by Apple.
Naturally, it runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

For BackLog to work reliably, the app must be run from an admin account, or using ‘sudo’ (user-discretion advised)

Website
Direct Download (801KB, zipped)

It’s also my first app completely written in Swift. That doesn’t make the app any better or worse. It’s just a fun fact.

If you have any feedback or questions, you can reach me any time by eMail. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.



Enjoy 🤗


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