Cocoa

June 29, 2017

Yoink 3.3 adds “File Recall”, Better Sharing Tools and More

Yoink Mac App Icon

I’m happy to tell you that today, Yoink 3.3 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.

What Is Yoink?

Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac.

Simplify.

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.

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.

Improve.

Drag and drop is improved in several ways, including:

Collect multiple files from different locations you’d like to move to one destination without having to go back and forth
Split up a multiple-files-drag so you can move files to different places without having to go back and forth
Copy files to multiple locations more efficiently

Customize.

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.

Yoink appearing at the mouse cursor

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.

What’s New in Yoink 3.3?

Version 3.3 lets you bring back files to the app that you’ve previously removed, in case you find you need to move or copy the file(s) somewhere else.
Just keep its keyboard shortcut pressed (by default, F5)

Press and Hold Shortcut Key in Yoink

or right-click onto Yoink to bring back previously removed files:

Right-click onto Yoink

Webloc files can now optionally show favicons for quicker identification:

Yoink loading favicons for webloc files

Further Improvements

Yoink now includes macOS’ “Share” menu to more easily share files to different services
More easily add links from your browser to Yoink by right-clicking onto it in your browser and selecting Share -> Yoink
A new Alfred File Action to make sending files from Alfred to Yoink possible (activate it in Yoink’s “Advanced” preferences)
Many improvements, refinements and bug fixes

Pricing and Availability

Yoink 3.3 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 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 v3.3. 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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February 13, 2017

Mac Developer Tip: Programmatically Starting a Search on the Mac App Store

Working on Transloader 3, I wanted to re-implement the Finder’s Open With… contextual menu:

The Finder's Open With contextual menu

Getting the apps in there turned out to be the easy part. What took some effort was the “App Store…” menu item, as I wanted to precisely replicate its functionality.

Transloader 3's Open With contextual menu

Right-click a file in Finder, select Open With -> App Store…, and it will launch the Mac App Store with a UTI search, for example: uti:public.zip-archive.
This will give you a list of all apps available in the Mac App Store that can handle that file type. Neat!

The ‘macappstores’ URL scheme

The Mac App Store app luckily offers a URL scheme:

macappstores://
Launches the Mac App Store
macappstores://showUpdatesPage
Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to your Updates page
macappstores://showPurchasesPage
Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to your Purchased page
macappstores://itunes.apple.com/app/idYOURAPPID
Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to the product page, identified by the product ID

That’s very practical, but not what I was looking for. I was in need of a way to start a search the way Finder does.

In order to find out the URL Finder uses, I wrote a quick throwaway-app that would overtake the Mac App Store’s URL schemes (using LSSetDefaultHandlerForURLScheme) and print out the URL that was opened.
Alas – no dice. Apparently, Finder uses Apple Events or some other magic that “can not be used in a third-party sandboxed app anyway”™ to do its bidding.

After googling the issue, I found a URL that supposedly worked: macappstores://ax.search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?q=searchterm, but just to pour more salt into an already wide-open wound, it only worked on pre-10.9 systems:

The search URL in 10.9-and-beyond systems

Another dead end. Or was it?
I guess I should have experimented with that URL a little, because Jan Vitturi (@jan4843 on twitter) had the answer: just remove “ax.” from the URL, and it works (on both pre-10.9 and post-10.9 systems)!

Using this URL:
macappstores://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?q=searchterm
I was able to get a search going on the Mac App Store, right from within my app.

Sadly, there’s a caveat.
I can’t do a UTI search this way. When I pass (even a percent-escaped) search term along the lines of ‘uti:public.zip-archive’, the Mac App Store tells me there are no results. Reloading that very same page then does show the results – weird and annoying, but nothing I was able to work around.
Using extension:zip seemed to work a little better, but still didn’t return all results a reload would.

Jan Vitturi to the rescue again – the URL’s a little different for UTI or extension searches:
macappstores://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/docTypeLookup?uti=youruti

Alternatively, instead of uti=…, you can use extension=… to search by file path extensions.

My sincere thanks go to Jan Vitturi!

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February 8, 2017

Mac Developer Tip: NSTouchBar in a Share Extension

You’re working on your Share extension with support for MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, but it’s empty and doesn’t appear when your extension is loaded?

NSTouchBar Empty

The solution is simple:

Solution for showing NSTouchBar from within a Share extension

Call [self.view.window makeFirstResponder:self.view]; and it will push your glorious NSTouchBar onto the stack:

NSTouchBar working in a Share extension

Hope it helps – it would have saved me 20 minutes if I’d known 😉

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October 29, 2016

How to Badge an App’s Icon in the Dock

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:

Does badging happen automatically when sending an NSUserNotification?
If not, how do I apply a badge to my app’s icon in the first place?
How do I retrieve and respect the user’s Notification settings for the app in System Preferences?

Automatic Badging by Sending a NSUserNotification?

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.

How to Badge the App’s Icon?

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.

Respecting System Preferences’ Notifications Settings?

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:

Code sign your app.
Add this key-value pair to your Info.plist: NSUserNotificationAlertStyle with a string value of either banner (recommended by Apple) or alert.
Supposedly, there’s another value, none, but that hasn’t worked for me yet – the app won’t appear in the Notifications preference pane.

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.