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From today, November 25th, 2022, to the end of Sunday, November 27th, all my apps are on sale for Black Friday!
Moving files and app-content on your Mac around can be cumbersome. Yoink for Mac makes it so much easier (plus lots of other features, like a clipboard monitoring widget – please refer to the website for more info):
Yoink for iPad and iPhone is your place to store snippets and files, and sync them across all your iOS devices; via Handoff, you can transfer them to or from a Mac as well!
It also features clipboard monitoring, which, via Picture-in-Picture, works even if Yoink is completely dismissed. You can also use its Picture-in-Picture functionality to display images, websites, PDFs, eMails and more (you can even scroll through them).
With Transloader, you can initiate downloads on your Macs – remotely from your iPhones, iPads, and other Macs.
With its custom Link- and File Actions, you can automate Transloader to your liking whenever it receives a link (Link Action), or successfully downloads a file (File Action).
With ScreenFloat, you can take your screenshots to the next level. Take a screenshot, and it will float above all other windows and spaces, allowing you to reference their contents wherever you are. Organize shots with tags and categories in its Shots Browser.
And don’t forget: ScreenFloat 2.0 is in development and will be a free upgrade for existing customers!
I’m happy to announce a new app today: Citator for iPhone and iPad. The brain-child of Clemens Bauer, Citator is a currently free app that lets you store, cherish and share memorable quotes.
Earlier this year, Clemens – whom I’ve known from the time we worked together on a local Apple Retailer’s customer loyalty app – approached me with an idea for an app to safe-keep quotes in. Previous apps he had used for this appeared to become abandoned, and he desired a fresh, modern approach.
Features
A beautiful list you can filter or search to quickly find quotes you’ve stored before
Save Quotes from the app, or from any app using the Share- or Action sheet
In addition to the quote itself, you can specify the author of a quote, where and when it originated, and where you found it
Author’s images are automatically loaded from Wikipedia if available
Display a static quote you select on your Home- or Lock Screen (requires iOS 16) with a widget
Display a random quote (which can change in an interval of your choosing) on your Home- or Lock Screen (requires iOS 16) with a widget
Share quotes as text, or as beautifully rendered images
A quote shared as an image from Citator
Automatic loading author images from Wikipedia in action.
Pricing and Availability
Citator is currently free, available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. The app requires iOS 15 or newer and is currently localized in English and German.
TidBits and Fun Facts about the App and its Development
SwiftUI
The app is 100% SwiftUI, which, apart from a few SwiftUI widgets here and there for my other apps, marks my first fully-featured SwiftUI app. I’ve always said that learning something new is always easiest on-the-go. That’s how I learned Objective-C many years back, it’s how I learned Swift, and now, it’s how I’m learning SwiftUI. But It’s been a struggle for sure, and I don’t know yet what to think of it. I do like parts of it. Yet I passionately hate that sometimes the simplest of things require workarounds upon workarounds. I’m not saying I know a lot about SwiftUI (I do not!), but as “the future of developing for Apple platforms” (paraphrasing here), it’s nowhere where it should be, in my opinion. You want different code-paths for different iOS versions in your @ViewBuilder? You’re entering a world of pain. You want to show a simple share sheet pre-iOS 16? Not available natively. You want to show a popover for a specific row in a list? Yeah, right, virtually impossible. There are a lot more like these, and it can be very frustrating. And I admit, I don’t quite understand the premise of SwiftUI. Years and years were spent on creating graphical user interfaces, to the point where, in Xcode, for example, one could drag user interface elements for the app you’re working on where you want them to be and have an options interface to configure them to look the way you desire. Now, the supposed future is going back to command-line-like interface programming for GUIs? Isn’t that a step back? For now, I’d choose Xcode’s storyboards and auto-layout over SwiftUI any time.
It me.
List Row Backgrounds
A quote by Steve Wozniak, and a quote by an unknown author.
The background of a quote in Citator is a blurred, darkened (or lightened, in light mode) version of the author’s image. However, sometimes, there is no author specified for a quote, or an image cannot be found, which would render that quote’s background solid black or white, making it stand out in an out-of-place fashion. Luckily, I found an – in my opinion – elegant solution. I thought it would be neat to have a background image created from the quote text itself. I don’t know why, but the concept of the quote text itself creating its own, unique background felt fitting to me, especially for this app.
Colors can be represented as hexadecimal values (i.e., #FF0000 for red, #00FF00 for green, or #0000FF for blue). All I needed was to turn the quote text into a hexadecimal representation. The hashing algorithm MD5 takes data and creates a hash value of it, which consists of characters from A-F and from 0-9, which is the same hex color values consist of. So when no author image is available, Citator creates an MD5 hash of the quote text and a bit of “salt” for added randomness (the author and the date), splits it up into individual, 6-character/digit strings and uses those to create a blurred, darkened/lightened gradient background image.
Colorful quote backgrounds, created from the quotes themselves.
Customizable Widgets
I love how the widgets turned out. You can have static ones, where a quote you select will be displayed until you change it, and you can have dynamic/random ones, where the quote changes in an interval you define, with rules you set up.
A Citator widget, displaying a quote by Joan Baez.
Options for a dynamic / random-quote widget.
I also adore the new Lock Screen widgets. Clemens in particular was very happy that widgets can now be displayed on the Lock Screen in iOS 16, and they are a perfect fit for Citator.
Two Citator widgets on the iOS 16 Lock Screen.
The quotes used in App Store promotional material
At first, I thought I’d use quotes from movies (like in the short video above, with quotes from the fictional characters Dr. Ellie Sattler, Dr. Ian Malcolm and Indiana Jones). But then I got worried about copyright issues and scrapped the idea. After a while of thinking about it, my mind wandered to Apple’s Think Different campaign, and that’s when I had the solution to my problem. All quotes featured in the App Store promotional screenshots are by personalities featured in Apple’s Think Different campaign, like Amelia Earheart, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Baez, Martha Graham and John Lennon.
Clemens and I hope you enjoy Citator. There’s more cool stuff yet to come!
For a limited time (ending on April 9th, 2022), you can get DEVONthink and Yoink for Mac at a 20% discount!
DEVONthink – Get Organized, Unleash Your Creativity
DEVONthink is your paperless office. It stores all your documents, helps you keep them organized, and presents you with what you need to get the job done. The app lets you focus on your work, while it remembers all the details.
With its powerful tools and custom A.I., DEVONthink enables you to collect, organize, edit and annotate documents of any kind, and have them automatically analyzed, connected and filed. And even better, everything is securely synced between your Macs, iPads and iPhones.
For example: Set up a smart rule to watch a folder for added files. With its rich set of options, the app will automatically import matching files and sort them appropriately – a huge time saver for receipts, for instance.
DEVONthink is a file and media browser, but doesn’t stop there. It’s a snippet keeper and note taker, but doesn’t stop there, either. It’s a database and organizational tool. It’s what you need it to be to get stuff done.
Watch Kourosh Dini MD, a happy user of DEVONthink, harness the power of the app’s AI.
Yoink – Simplify and Improve Drag and Drop
Yoink offers you 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.
Use Yoink to get even more files into DEVONthink, even easier and faster 😎