Usage Tips

While Transloader is able to download all kinds of file links, it does not directly support downloading videos from YouTube, for example.

That’s where Downie by Charlie Monroe comes in.

Enter Downie

Downie lets you easily download videos from thousands of different sites.
Just copy-paste the link of a video you find on YouTube, or Vimeo – or any number of video hosting sites – to Downie, and it’ll download the video.
It’s that easy.

Downie and Transloader

Use Transloader in combination with Downie, and you can download videos you come across on your iPhones and iPads on a Mac remotely.
Set up a Link Action for YouTube links, and Transloader on Mac will forward those to Downie, which will download them right away.

Setting up a Link Action in Transloader

In Transloader’s preferences, select Actions and add a Link Action. Configure it to launch Downie for links that point to youtube.com:

Now, anytime you assign your Mac a YouTube link with Transloader, the Mac app will forward it to Downie for download:

Quick Tip

To avoid Downie potentially asking for user input while you’re away, open its preferences, select Advanced and select Run in automated mode.

And that’s it!

Get Downie

You can get Downie here (a free trial is available).

Get Transloader

Get Transloader for Mac, iPhone and iPad here (a free trial is available).

For more tips on getting the most out of Transloader, check out the Usage Tips page.

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At the end of September 2014, I wrote about upcoming changes in Transloader for iOS.

Transloader iOS 8 Action Extension Icon

Today Widget

In that blog post, I wrote about a Today Widget that you could use to easily paste URLs you had copied to your pasteboard on iOS.
It would look like this:

I was pretty sure this would be the way to go, but after using it for a while and iterating on it, I became more and more convinced that this was not an optimal solution.

It’s not optimal for a couple of reasons.

– Although it’s far better than before iOS 8, where you had to open the Transloader app itself to get things going, the Today Widget approach is still a little cumbersome: copy the link, open Notification Center and tap the + button
– You’d have to do this for every link you’d like to add from a website, for example
– Doing that would erase your pasteboard contents you had copied before
– It takes you out of the app’s context

Action Extensions to the Rescue

So I started looking into Action Extensions. And now, this is possible:

transloaderaction

Exactly. Instead of going back and forth to copy several links from a website to add to Transloader, it can all be done on the website itself.

If you’re on a file site itself (for example, you’re viewing a PDF in your browser), you can add it to Transloader more easily as well:

fileaction

Conclusion

I think the combination of these two, the Today Widget (where you’ll still be able to paste links into Transloader, because I think it might still be useful to a lot of users) and the Action Extension will make Transloader very accessible and easy to use on iOS 8.

It will be available soon on the App Store.

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My name is Matt, I’m the developer of Eternal Storms Software. If you’d like to comment, you can catch me on twitter here: [twitter-follow screen_name=’eternalstorms’ show_count=’yes’] or by eMail.

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