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Yoink for iPad and iPhone - Icon

I’m very pleased to announce the immediate availability of Yoink v2.0 for iPad and iPhone.
It’s a a free upgrade for everyone who’s purchased before and has a lot of great, new features, like iCloud Sync, Handoff and Siri Shortcuts.

Yoink Overview

What’s Yoink?

Yoink is your storage space (or “shelf”, as some would call it) for everything you’d like to keep around for a little while – text snippets, images, files – just about anything you wish.
Use drag and drop with Yoink as a Slide-Over or Side-by-Side app to store files, or use the Action/Share extension, the Today Widget or the File Provider to get files into Yoink.

Yoink 2.0 running on iPad Air and iPhone X

How does Yoink work?

The most obvious use case is to drag and drop files to it from other apps, like selected text, or images from websites, or emails, or map locations, just to name a few.
However, there are a number of ways to save files in Yoink:
– Yoink’s Share/Action extension shows up in almost any share sheet.
– The Today widget lets you quickly store your clipboard’s contents
– In the Files app, you can drag and drop files to Yoink’s file provider (and actually do that from any app that supports iOS 11’s files browser)
– Siri Shortcuts help you save your clipboard’s contents or start downloads with a simple voice command, and without having to activate Yoink

So, now that you’ve got all your files in Yoink, how can you get it out again?

– You can drag and drop anything from Yoink to any other app that supports drag and drop (and the dragged file types).
– Anything in Yoink can be copied to your clipboard.
– Yoink’s keyboard: Wherever you’re editing text, Yoink is right there with you – in the form of a keyboard. On iPad, drag and drop items out to where you’d like them in your text; on iPhone tap to copy items.
– Yoink’s Today widget: Tap any item in the widget and it’s copied to your clipboard
– The file provider: Any app that support’s iOS 11’s Files browser can access items stored in Yoink
– Spotlight search: The system-wide search can find any item stored in Yoink and take you right to it in the app

What’s New in Yoink v2.0?

iCloud Sync

Yoink 2.0 iCloud Sync on iPhone X

Yoink syncs your items across all your iOS devices using iCloud (Mac sync will follow at a later date).
Each device has its own “shelf” in Yoink, neatly grouping items together so you’ll always know where to find them.
Not only are synced files accessible via Yoink itself, but all relevant extensions as well: the keyboard, the today widget, Spotlight and the File provider.

Handoff

Yoink 2.0 Handoff on iPad Air

Transfer files between your iPads, iPhones and Macs (separate Yoink for Mac app v3.5 required) using Handoff.
When files are selected on the sending device, those are transmitted. If no selection is made, you’ll be able to select on the receiving device.

Siri Shortcuts

Yoink Siri Shortcuts iOS 12 on iPhone X

Using Siri on iOS 12, you can store your clipboard’s contents or download the link on your clipboard in Yoink, all without having to switch-to or activate Yoink.
You can also copy files from Yoink, for instance, the most recently added image, PDF, text or weblink.
Lastly, you can tell open to show you a specific sync’ed device with a simple voice command.

Keyboard commands

Yoink can now be almost completely controlled by external keyboards. Selecting items, viewing their contents, searching, copying, pasting can all be done without you having to touch your screen.

Dark Mode and smaller icons

Yoink can now be used in a beautiful dark mode.
You can also set it up to use smaller icons, so you can show more files at once.

… and much more!

There are lots of other improvements and bug fixes, like being able to edit text right from Yoink, improved download notifications, better and more efficient icon creation and Spotlight indexing, support for universal links or in-app search.
Basically, not one part of Yoink has gone unimproved. It uses less memory and has become more responsive and reliable.

Pricing and Availability

Yoink for iPad and iPhone is available on the App Store for the price of $5.99 / £5.99 / €6,99, with all features unlocked – there’s no subscription or in-app purchase.

Yoink requires an iPad or iPhone that runs iOS 11 or newer.
It’s available in English, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. More languages will follow.

Yoink is also available for (and originated on) Mac, exclusively available on the Mac App Store for the price of $6.99 / £6.99 / €7,99, with a free, 15-day trial available on its website.

Links

Yoink for iPad and iPhone – Website
Yoink for iPad and iPhone – App Store
App Preview Video – “Add”
App Preview Video – “Drag out”
Yoink for iPad and iPhone – Usage Tips
Yoink for iPad and iPhone – Press Kit

Yoink for Mac – Website
Yoink for Mac – Mac App Store

Eternal Storms Software – Website
Eternal Storms Software – Blog
Eternal Storms Software – Twitter
Eternal Storms Software – YouTube
Eternal Storms Software – Facebook
Eternal Storms Software – Instagram

I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing what you think about this update. I hope you’ll enjoy it 🙂

If you have any feedback or questions, please don’t hesitate to write me!

With warm regards
– Matt

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Today, I released two quick updates to my apps Yoink for Mac and ScreenFloat. Here’s what’s changed.

Yoink for Mac v3.4.3

Yoink for Mac app icon

– Fixed a rare crash when trying to share files
– Fixes a bug where the keyboard shortcut would act up after deleting a file held by Yoink in Finder or using the app’s Share extension
– Fixed a bug where, after changing the screen’s resolution, Yoink would be misplaced

Links:
Yoink for Mac Website (with free, 15-day demo)
Yoink on the Mac App Store

ScreenFloat v1.5.15

ScreenFloat App Icon

– Fixes a rare crash when dragging the mini-icon of a floating shot


Links:
ScreenFloat Website (with free, 15-day demo)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store

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flickery icon

flickery v1.9.45, a critical bug fix release, has just been released both on the Mac App Store and via the app’s update mechanism.

What’s flickery?

flickery is a full-featured desktop client for flickr, allowing you to manage your photo stream, favorites, albums, galleries and more.

That’s still around?

I admit, flickery hasn’t seen an update in quite a while (the last one on October 24th, 2014 – it’s quite embarrassing).
Managing and maintaining five different apps is quite a task for one person, and in the case of flickery, one thing just lead to another and I somehow was never able to keep updating it regularly.

I had started development of version 2.0, but as that Yahoo sale happened, I paused again, not knowing where things would go.
Now flickr is in the hands of SmugMug, and after a very brief first conversation with them, I’m thinking flickr’s in a good place. Let’s see where things go from here.

What’s New in flickery v1.9.45?

  • A crash was fixed that occurred when loading galleries (which sometimes lead to a crash during authorization)
  • A crash was fixed when cancelling an upload
  • A bug was fixed where you couldn’t take screenshots anymore from within flickery’s upload section
  • Due to the Mac App Store’s API restrictions, flickery now uses AVFoundation for its video playback instead of QuickTime, leading to increased system requirements (macOS Lion 10.7.3 or newer is now required)

Increased System Requirements

flickery used to use the QuickTime and QTKit frameworks for video editing and playback. Trying to compile that code lead to several errors, as the frameworks are not available anymore on macOS High Sierra (possibly earlier), so (with invaluable help from Phil Dennis-Jordan (twitter) ) I had to copy them over from macOS Snow Leopard, since that’s the version of macOS I was targeting.
Building worked, and I was confident I could release right away, but then this happened:

Xcode warning: Deprecated API usage

Apparently, Apple no longer accepts apps that use the QuickTime or QTKit APIs (even if you’re targeting very old versions of macOS). So back to Xcode I went, assessing how much work it would be to move everything from QuickTime/QTKit over to AVFoundation.

The most critical parts were, of course, video playback so you could watch videos posted to flickr. Other parts where I used those APIs were recording photos and videos with your Mac’s FaceTime camera and trimming videos that were longer than allowed for upload, but I decided to scrap those features for now so I could release quickly. I’m guessing they were rarely used anyway, if at all.

Updating the remaining code turned out to be a couple of hours of work (it wasn’t all that difficult, to be honest), but resulted in increased system requirements, as AVFoundation is only available on macOS Lion (10.7) and up.

I wanted to keep supporting macOS Snow Leopard (10.6) with flickery 1.x, but I would have had to take out video playback for that build, and I didn’t want to.

Availability

Version 1.9.45 of flickery is a free update for existing customers of the app, both on the Mac App Store and from the website.

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When copying files in Finder, you might have noticed that the newly created, still-being-written-to files are ‘grayed out’, conveniently informing the user that the file is not ready yet.

Greyed out files in Finder

I wanted to replicate that for an upcoming upgrade of Transloader (along with a progress indicator, as you can see in the screenshot above, but that’s another topic), and after trying a couple of things, I found out how to do it.

I tested this on macOS High Sierra only, since it’s the OS version I’m targeting right now, but I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work on earlier versions of macOS.

It’s All in the Date

After digging around on the internet, I found that all that needs to be done is to change the file’s creation- and modification dates to one specific date, namely:
January 24th, 1984, 09:00:00 AM

Setting the creation and modification dates of the file to be greyed out

And it works great – the created file appears ‘grayed out’ in Finder.

There’s a downside, however:
When copying a file in Finder, and trying to move that still-being-written-to file, Finder will display a convenient message that tells the user the file is in use and moving it might cause problems.
This doesn’t happen when using this date-setting approach.

So I kept digging.

The Solution

What I did, then, was use Terminal and the ‘mdls’ command to list the meta data of the still-being-written-to file:

mdls in Terminal on a copying file

At first, coming from the date-approach, I noticed the kMDItemFSCreationDate item, stating
1904-01-01 00:00:00 +0000

However, setting that as the creation date does nothing at all.

Then, I noticed the kMDItemFSCreatorCode and kMDItemFSTypeCode fields (red arrows in the screenshot of Terminal above).

Setting those like this…

Setting creator and type codes in Objective-C

…does exactly what I wanted – it ‘grays out’ the file in Finder, and displays the convenient Finder error message when trying to move it:

Finder error message when trying to move a still being written to file

Mission accomplished – we’re done!

Please keep in mind, though, that the user may still choose “Continue” to move the file, so you should definitely use an NSFileCoordinator to take care of that.

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