I’d like to quickly inform you that, as part of TwoDollarTuesday, I have a sale of Yoink going on right now.
Yoink is 72% off on the Mac App Store ($1.99 instead of $6.99) for a limited time.
Also, yesterday I released an update for it, bringing it to version 3.2.6, fixing an issue with Microsoft Outlook and the Dock. It also brings minor improvements in low-memory situations.
Links:
Yoink on the Mac App Store
Yoink Website / direct Demo download
I hope you enjoy it 🙂
A recent conversation I had with Jeff Johnson (of ClickToFlash fame, @lapcatsoftware on twitter) prompted me to look into how badging an app’s icon in macOS’ Dock works.
There were a couple of questions that needed answering:
Nope, automatic badging doesn’t happen. Even though System Preferences -> Notifications suggests that badges and notifications belong together, in code, they’re separated.
That means you have to add the badge to your app’s icon yourself. Also, you need to keep track of whatever number you want to display with the badge and update or clear it at appropriate times.
For example, Mail.app uses the badge to display the amount of unread eMails you have. The badge doesn’t clear when you activate Mail and only decreases when you mark mails as read.
Transmission, on the other hand, informs you about how many downloads have finished since you last had the app active. Once you activate the app again, the badge gets cleared and re-starts from zero.
Badging is straightforward:
NSApp.dockTile.badgeLabel = @"Badge";
Please note that putting text into the badge is not a good idea – I did it here just for fun, but text in the badge is very limited and if you have a longer string, what you’ll end up with is something like “A….z”.
It’s best to stick with numbers.
If you only use badges (without notifications), you’ll notice your app is missing from System Preferences’ Notifications preference pane.
That can pose a problem, because now you either have to create your own user-setting for badges or the user will have no way of turning them off.
The trick, then, lies with NSUserNotification. Not in the API itself, but in two crucial steps:
Having the key-value pair in your Info.plist has no downside if you don’t use NSUserNotifications. There’s only the upside of having the user be able to disable your app’s badges if they like.
Now that the user can change the setting for your app’s badges, how do you read it out to see if you should badge or not? It’s easier than you think: you don’t.
Just like the system doesn’t show your NSUserNotifications if the user has disabled them for your app, the Dock simply doesn’t display your badge if the user has disabled it in System Preferences.
All you have to do is keep track of the number that should be displayed in the badge, and that you update or clear it at appropriate times.
For example, you might not want to have the badge visible when the user quits your app, so you could set -badgeLabel to nil in -applicationWillTerminate:.
By the way, if you ever need to reset System Preferences – Notifications for your app (or all apps), there’s a nice how-to on stackoverflow.
Happy badging 🙂
Update: Jeff Johnson follows up with some more tips and tricks about NSUserNotification in this blog post.
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[This is a follow-up to this blog post. It was inspired by the response I received through social media and different websites.]
In a previous version of Yoink, I had the following conundrum:
The checkbox “Show window near mouse pointer when drag is initiated” is inactive and needs extra steps to be activated.
If I’m a new user of the app, at first, I have no idea how to activate that checkbox. At best, it’s something I need to set in this preference panel, at worst it’s a setting in a different one.
As a new user, my only option is to blindly change settings, waiting for one to activate the checkbox so I can select it.
There are different solutions to this problem, of varying degrees of effective- and usefulness:
“For that UI, I think maybe an additional improvement would be to actually hide and show the checkbox completely instead of disabling it.
Also, indent the second checkbox so that it feels like it’s a sub-section of the first.
Another option might be to split things out into radio buttons instead of checkboxes and the popup menu.
That way you could expose the additional option tied to the appropriate radio choice, which you can’t exactly do with the menu item.”– Manton Reece, via Core Intuition’s slack channel
Since there are only two options for « automatically show when », maybe the setting could be radios instead of a select.
Then each option would be formatted as a column and each column would contain specific settings (the « drag starts » column would contain the « Show window near mouse pointer when drag is initiated » checkbox. Then it would make sens that clicking the checkbox would also set to « drag starts ».– Adrien Maston, via eMail
What I ended up doing in Yoink v3.2.1, the release that followed this discussion, was this:
Instead of having the checkbox inactive, it’s active at all times and can be clicked right away. The advantage of this is that for one, the user knows the option exists and two, the user can select the option right away without having to figure out how to activate it.
The downside, and this has been pointed out to me a couple of times, and I agree, is that clicking the checkbox changes two settings at once (the checkbox and the popup, as you can see in the GIF above). It changes a setting the user has made before. And that’s bad UX design on its own right there.
My thinking was, it’s in the same preference pane, so the user sees what’s happening right away. It still was the wrong decision (as has been pointed out to me in the comments on designernews.co).
For Yoink v3.2.5, I re-thought the whole thing and decided to make it three options in a popup.
This is the result:
It solves a couple of things:
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I’m happy to tell you that today, Yoink 3.2.5 is 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, even if you’ve tried it before.
Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac.
It simplifies drag and drop by providing a temporary place for files you drag, so you can navigate more easily to the destination of the files. It’s especially useful when trying to move or copy files between different windows, Spaces or (fullscreen) applications.
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.
Drag and drop is improved in several ways, including:
You can customize Yoink’s behavior so it fits in perfectly with your workflow. Aside from having to option to show it at either edge of your screen (at the top, center or bottom), you can set it up to only appear when you drag files to the edge of your screen or to appear directly at your mouse cursor when you start dragging, making drag and drop even faster.
For applications where you don’t need Yoink, add them to a “blacklist”, so Yoink doesn’t interfere with your work. A keyboard shortcut (by default, F5) lets you manually show or hide it, should you need it anyways.
Version 3.2.5 improves support for photos dragged from Photos.app on macOS Sierra, reduces the app’s energy footprint and CPU usage during drags and improves the user experience throughout several parts of the app.
As a result of the discussion about disabled checkboxes being poor UX design (blog post), I updated Yoink’s “Behavior” preferences pane to have a more understandable UI:
Yoink 3.2.5 is available for purchase on the Mac App Store for the price of $6.99 / £4.99 / €6,99. 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.
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 v3.2.5. 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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Stay up-to-date on all things Eternal Storms Software and join my low-frequency newsletter (one mail a month at most).
Thank you 🙂