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Yoink Mac App Icon

Just a quick note to let you know that Yoink 3.4.1 is now available for download from the Mac App Store. It’s a free upgrade for everyone who’s purchased it before. You can download a 15-day trial for the app here.

Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac.

Moving a file with Yoink

When you start moving a file in Finder, or app-content like an image from a website, Yoink appears at the edge of your screen, offering a temporary place for you to drag the files to. Without having to keep the mouse button pressed, you can now get to the destination of your file quicker and easier.

What’s New in Yoink v3.4.1?

This version is a maintenance update, improving compatibility with a lot of apps (like Apple Mail and Photos, and many 3rd party apps) and increases the overall stability and performance of the app, for example, it fixes a bug that caused Yoink to no longer work until a restart of the app in some cases.

Pricing and Availability

Yoink 3.4.1 is available for purchase on the Mac App Store for the price of $6.99 / £6.99 / €7,99. It is a free update for existing customers of the app. You can download a free, 15-day demo version here, even if you’ve tried Yoink before. Yoink runs on Macs with OS X Lion 10.7.3 or newer. OS X Yosemite or newer is recommended.

If you’re interested in writing about Yoink, you can download the press kit here, which contains screenshots, links to a short video and further information.
Promo codes are available to members of the press at press (at) eternalstorms (dot) at.

Yoink is also available for iPad and iPhone.

Yoink Usage Tips

To get the most out of Yoink, I’m collecting useful tips and tricks for you on this website.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to see what you think about Yoink v3.4.1. If you like the app, please consider leaving a little review on the Mac App Store, it would help me out a lot! Should you have trouble with it or have any feedback or questions, please be sure to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you! Thank you.

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Yoink for iOS Icon

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Yoink v1.1 for iPad and iPhone.
It’s currently being featured on the App Store under “New Apps We Love”.

What’s Yoink for iOS 11?

Yoink strives to improve and simplify drag and drop and speed up your workflow.
It accepts almost anything you can drag, copy or share on your iPad and stores it for later use. This way, your fingers are free for more important things.

It’s a storage place for anything you might need later – an image from a website, a text snippet from a document, a URL, etc.

Here’s a quick YouTube video of how it works (check your sound, there’s some music) :

And a second one (with music, again) :

What’s New in Yoink v1.1?

Aside from numerous improvements and bug fixes, like an improved keyboard extension, the ability to create stacks by dragging items onto one another, smarter Spotlight indexing and a new take on the Share extension (it doesn’t need confirmation anymore for adding items), there are a lot of new features:

Clipboard Integration
When you open Yoink and have something new on your clipboard, Yoink will automatically offer to store it for you.
(You can configure this so Yoink doesn’t ask at all, and anything new gets automatically stored when you launch the app).

Download URLs
When you use Yoink’s Action extension to send something from another app to Yoink, the extension automatically detects if it’s a URL you are saving.
If that’s the case, you have the option of downloading the file the URL points to instead of saving the link to the URL in Yoink.
An optional notification can inform you about finished or failed downloads.

Today Widget
From the Today Widget, you can quickly copy the most recent items stored in Yoink to your clipboard, and save content from your clipboard in Yoink.

Quicker Sharing, Copying
Instead of having to tap Edit any time you’d like to share an item from Yoink with another app, each item and stack in Yoink now has a button that lets you quickly access those options.

Better iPhone Awareness
Quick Actions (via 3D Touch on the Home screen) for quickly adding your clipboard contents from your home screen, or to start a download.
Peek and Pop for items and stacks in Yoink
Full iPhone X  support

URL Scheme
You can now communicate with Yoink from other apps using Yoink’s URL scheme.
For more information, please visit the Yoink for iOS Usage Tips website and read Tip #6 🙂

File Provider
Finally. After being rejected by Apple for the initial version of Yoink (over and over again), the file provider extension has now been approved and is part of the Yoink experience on your iOS device.
Any app that uses the documents browser can now access items stored in Yoink.

Pricing and Availability

Yoink for iOS is available on the App Store right now, a little longer for the introductory price of $2.99 (€3,49). An iPad or iPhone with iOS 11 is required.

Yoink is also available on the Mac.

Links

Yoink for iPad and iPhone Website: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/ios
Yoink for iOS Usage Tips: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/ios/tips
Yoink for iPad and iPhone on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1260915283?mt=8
Yoink for iOS Press Kit: https://eternalstorms.at/press/Yoink-iPad-1-Press-Kit.zip

Yoink for Mac Website: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/mac
Yoink for Mac Usage Tips: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/mac/tips
Yoink on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id457622435?mt=12
Yoink for Mac Press Kit: https://eternalstorms.at/press/Yoink-3-Press-Kit.zip

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As some of you may know, getting Yoink for iOS through Apple’s App Review was, to say it lightly, a bit of a pain.
In the end, I was able to release it, but a month late. Had this been my first app as an indie developer, there’s a good chance I would have had to declare bankruptcy now.
I am fortunate enough to have a couple of apps out already that create a steady income, but still, I spent about two months exclusively on this app, so it’s still scary thinking about how I got rejected over and over.

Long story short, here’s a couple of thoughts I’ve had during all of this.

TestFlight App Review

From the very beginning, I’ve had Yoink available to a couple of (awesome) testers via TestFlight.
Now, when you add a new app or a new version of the app to TestFlight, it has to go through a review before testers can download and test it.

My question, then, is: Why not reject the app right there if it doesn’t comply with the rules in the App Reviewer’s eyes?
If this is not checked, why have a review for TestFlight apps in the first place?

Or if that’s unrealistic for some reason, perhaps TestFlight App Review could give sort of a “likelihood of getting through the ‘real’ App Review”. Maybe on the levels of “yea, good luck with that” to “possibly, tentatively not going to be rejected”.

It would have saved me (and the App Review person) a *lot* of time and nerves had, for example, the File Provider extension been rejected right then and there for not being cloud-storage based. Or the keyboard, for not having a traditional method of input. Those are all things that could have been avoided, had TestFlight App Review caught these things.

Reasons for Rejection

Yoink was rejected for different reasons and in different areas of the app.
But those reasons were given to me one by one, one submission and “Waiting for Review” -> “In Review” cycle after another.
That’s *such* a waste of time (not only for the developer, but also for the reviewer. But *especially* for the developer).
Why not keep going after finding a reason for rejection and see if there are other issues after that? If so, the reviewer could note them all down and give them to the developer all at once, not one by one.

Notice of Escalation

When an App Reviewer isn’t sure about an app, the review is “escalated”, meaning it goes up one instance in the App Reviewer hierarchy to be reviewed by a “superior”.
That would be the perfect time to let the developer know in advance that, “look, review is going to take a little longer because we’ve run into an issue with your app. Please stay tuned, we’re working on it.”.
Not only would the developer know that it’s going to take longer for the app to be reviewed, they’d also have reassurance that the App Reviewer hasn’t forgotten about the app – anybody who had an app “In Review” for more than twelve hours knows that feeling 😉

In closing, I’d like to say that I have nothing but respect for App Reviewers. Their job is difficult and, mostly, unthankful.
But I believe a lot of grievances on both sides could be avoided if some of these suggestions were put in place.

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Glimpses Icon

Today, Glimpses v2.2, an app that creates Still Motion Videos with just a few clicks, is available for download from the Mac App Store.
It’s a free upgrade for everyone who purchased it before.
A free, 15-day trial is available for download here, even if you’ve tried it before.

What Is Glimpses?

When you want to show your awesome photos from your recent vacation but there are just too many, you can either sort through them and heavy-heartedly decide which ones to toss aside, or you show them all – with a Still Motion Video.
Still Motion Videos show photos in very rapid succession, usually for the fraction of a second. Mix that with a soundtrack, and you can make your video action-packed and powerful, or mellow and soothing. Or even both.

Glimpses lets you create such high-quality videos with just a few clicks. Import your photos (from your Photos.app library, a hard drive, Flickr or Instagram), add one or more soundtracks and you’re set – Glimpses figures out the rest.
The app creates your video in a smart way:

  • The video’s resolution (ranging from 240p to 4K) will be calculated by looking at the smallest photos you supply
  • Its duration is based on the amount of photos you imported, and the duration of the soundtracks you supplied
  • Soundtracks that turn out too long will automatically fade out smoothly at the end of your video, whereas short soundtracks can be looped
  • Pillar- and letterboxes can be eliminated, if the photo’s resolution allows for it
  • Due to built-in facial recognition, photos are positioned in a way that faces aren’t outside of the video’s frame

However, control is always at the user’s fingertips. For example, soundtracks can be edited so only your favorite part of it is used, in an easy-to-use, yet powerful way:

Screenshot of Glimpses' Soundtrack Editor

Additionally, every other aspect of your video can be manually set up:

Screenshot of Glimpses' Video Settings

What’s New in v2.2?

The update adds support for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar.

This enables you, without ever leaving Touch Bar, to quickly:
– import photos from flickr or Instagram

final-resized

– filter, or sort photos in your project

final-copy-2-resized

– control QuickLook

final-copy-resized

– and adjust your project’s audio- and video settings

P.S.: I’m having issues with these 3 GIFs looping. Please reload and scroll down to them if you’d like to see them. My apologies.

Additionally, the update improves its QuickLook Plugin so Glimpses project previews are generated a little quicker and more efficiently.
And lastly, I’ve improved the connection to Instagram, so that should work more reliably.

Pricing and Availability

Glimpses 2.2 is available for purchase on the Mac App Store for the price of $19.99 / £14.99 / €19.99. It is a free update for existing customers of the app.
A free, 15-day trial is available on the website, even if you’ve already tried the app.
Glimpses runs on Macs with OS X Yosemite or newer.

If you’re interested in writing about Glimpses, you can download its press kit here, which contains screenshots, a short sample video and further information. A limited amount of promotional codes are available to members of the press at press(at)eternalstorms(dot)at.

Links

Glimpses Website
http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses
Glimpses on the Mac App Store
https://itunes.apple.com/app/glimpses/id637565340?mt=12
Glimpses 15-Day Trial Direct Download
http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses/Glimpses.zip
Glimpses Press Kit
http://eternalstorms.at/press/Glimpses-2-Press-Kit.zip
Glimpses Sample Video on YouTube
https://youtu.be/NCa4Fg6uLoI

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to see what you think about Glimpses 2.2.
If you like the app, please consider leaving a little review on the Mac App Store, it would help me out a lot! Should you have any feedback or questions, please be sure to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you!
Thank you.

 

 

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