Public Relations

January 18, 2022

Introducing BackLog – a Freeware Developer Tool for Mac

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 🤗

January 7, 2022

SiriMote v1.4.4

Just a quick update on SiriMote, as I’ve been putting out a few updates for it over the last few weeks.

The app now has improved support for controlling the following apps with the Apple TV Siri Remote:
– Boinx Software’s FotoMagico
– Kodi
– Apple’s Keynote
– Apple’s TV App
– Infuse 7

SiriMote is freeware, and you can download it here.

Enjoy 🤗

October 7, 2021

Yoink for iPad and iPhone v2.4 – Improved Background Clipboard Monitoring

Yoink for iPad and iPhone v2.3.5 introduced Background Clipboard Monitoring, which, if enabled, stores anything you copy, even if Yoink itself is in the background, effectively giving you a clipboard history.

With version 2.4, I’ve improved it by adding the ability to only monitor for specific data types, and to temporarily pause the monitor.

Background Clipboard Monitoring in Action on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15

^{Captured on my iPad using iPadOS 15, lightly edited for brevity but otherwise unaltered}

^{For demonstrative purposes, I kept Yoink in the foreground as a Slide-Over app, just to show what gets added when.}
^{But all of this works even if Yoink is not visible on your display and put in the background.}

In the video above, I enable Yoink’s clipboard monitor and consecutively copy an image, a link, and some text; all get stored in Yoink.
I then use the Picture-in-Picture’s fast forward button to tell Yoink to only watch for text. With that option set, I again copy an image, a link, and some text; this time only the text is stored in Yoink.
I click the fast forward button again to make Yoink only save links, and repeat the copy-procedure of an image, a link, and some text; now, only the link gets stored in Yoink.
A final time I click the fast forward button to have Yoink only watch for images and – you guessed it – when I copy an image, a link and some text, only the image is added to Yoink.

Next, I pause the clipboard monitor by using Picture-in-Picture’s Pause button. Now, Yoink does not react to any copy events at all. By pressing the Play button in PiP, I reactivate the clipboard monitor.

Notes on the monitor’s behavior

The clipboard monitor attempts to ignore sensitive data, like passwords. For this, it refers to the pasteboard data types proposed at nspasteboard.org, and checks if there are any password-type app names contained in the pasteboard data types, like “1password”, or “keychain”, for example. If encountered, Yoink ignores the copy-event and waits for the next.

As for energy consumption, it is very light-weight.
The images you see in Picture-in-Picture are static – it doesn’t play video, it doesn’t play audio.
Yes, Yoink will continue running in the background because of this, but all it does is check your pasteboard every couple of seconds (and not even the data directly, only a “changeCount” value provided by the API).
If a change has occurred, it will save the content to Yoink and to disk.
Syncing – if enabled – only occurs when the app comes back to the foreground, so there is no added network activity.

Other Changes in Yoink v2.4

– I improved Yoink’s compatibility with GarageBand. Dragging an audio file to GarageBand from Yoink now works correctly
– Picture-in-Picture for arbitrary content now properly displays Map location items
– I fixed a memory leak and a couple of app crashes

Pricing and Availability

Yoink is available on the iOS App Store as a one-time purchase, for $5.99 / €5.99.
It is localized in English, German, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with more languages to follow.

I do hope you enjoy Yoink!
If you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to mail me, I’d love to hear from you.

Stay healthy and safe!

September 29, 2021

Yoink for iPad and iPhone v2.3.5 – Background Clipboard Monitoring

After releasing Yoink v2.3, which brought the app up-to-speed on all things iOS 15, I have another great update out for Yoink for iPad and iPhone, which allows you to make the app monitor your clipboard in the background and save almost anything you copy or cut.

Background Clipboard Monitoring

In the video above, you can see it in action, running on my iPad.
Starting the Clipboard Monitor offers you three options:
1. a 5-minute timeout
2. a 30-minute timeout, or
3. no timeout at all.

So, were you to start clipboard monitoring with a 5-minute timeout, it would save anything you copy or cut, and automatically end after 5 minutes, if you didn’t copy or cut anything in that time.
Clipboard monitoring also ends as soon as you close the Picture-in-Picture overlay.

Of course, this also works on iPhone:

So in addition to sharing content to Yoink with its Share extension, manually pasting content into the app, and Siri Shortcuts, you can now have anything you copy stored automatically in Yoink.

Notes on the monitor’s behavior

Yoink attempts to *not* save sensitive data, like passwords. It does so by referring to the pasteboard data types proposed at nspasteboard.org. It also checks if there are any common password-type app names contained in the pasteboard data types, like “1password”, or “keychain”, for example. If that’s the case, Yoink ignores the copy/cut event and waits for the next.

Regarding energy consumption, it’s very light-weight.
The Picture-in-Picture content is just a static image that changes to another static image if a copy-event was detected. It doesn’t play video, it doesn’t play audio.
Yes, Yoink will continue running in the background because of this, but all it does is check your pasteboard every couple of seconds (and not even the data directly, only a “changeCount” value provided by the API).
If a change has occurred, it will save the content to Yoink and to disk.
Syncing only occurs when the app comes back to the foreground, if enabled, so there are no round-trips to iCloud every time you copy something.

Another (already released) cool new feature in Yoink for i(Pad)OS 15

Just because I think it’s awesome, I thought I’d mention another Picture-in-Picture feature Yoink has been offering since iOS 15 was released – displaying arbitrary content in PiP.
This means you can view photos, texts, PDFs, eMails, websites and more in the Picture-in-Picture overlay.
Check out this video of it, where I open a website in PiP and scroll through it using its controls.

Links

I hope you enjoy Yoink’s recent updates. If you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to mail me, I’d love to hear it!

Stay healthy and safe!