From today, November 25th, 2022, to the end of Sunday, November 27th, all my apps are on sale for Black Friday!

Yoink for Mac

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 Mac currently holds a rating of 4.8/5.0 on the US Mac App Store and has frequently been featured by Apple

For Black Friday 2022, Yoink for Mac is over 30% off (USD 8.99 -> USD 5.99; EUR 10.99 -> EUR 6.99) on the Mac App Store.
Website (+ free, 30-day trial)
Yoink for Mac Usage Tips
Yoink on the Mac App Store (>30% off)
Yoink on Setapp

Yoink for iPad and iPhone

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!

Yoink for iPad and iPhone currently holds a rating of 4.7/5.0 on the US App Store

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).

For Black Friday 2022, Yoink for iPad and iPhone is over 25% off (USD 5.99 -> USD 3.99; EUR 6.99 -> EUR 4.99) on the App Store.
Website
Yoink for iPad and iPhone Usage Tips
Yoink on the App Store (> 25% off)

Transloader for Mac

With Transloader, you can initiate downloads on your Macs – remotely from your iPhones, iPads, and other Macs.

Transloader currently holds a rating of 4.8/5.0 on the US Mac App Store.

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).

For Black Friday, Transloader is over 30% off (USD 9.99 -> USD 6.99; EUR 11.99 -> EUR 7.99) on the Mac App Store.
Website (+free, 30-day trial)
Transloader Usage Tips
Get To Know Transloader 3 Blog Series
Transloader on the Mac App Store (>30% off)
Free iOS counterpart app
Transloader on Setapp

ScreenFloat

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.

ScreenFloat currently holds a rating of 4.9/5.0 on the US Mac App Store.

And don’t forget: ScreenFloat 2.0 is in development and will be a free upgrade for existing customers!

For Black Friday, ScreenFloat is over 33% off (USD 8.99 -> USD 5.99; EUR 10.99 -> EUR 6.99) on the Mac App Store.
Website (+free, 30-day trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (>33% off)

Glimpses

Create stunning still-motion videos easily and quickly, with Glimpses.

Glimpses currently holds a rating of 5.0/5.0 on the US Mac App Store.

For Black Friday, Glimpses is over 35% off (USD 20.99 -> USD 11.99; EUR 23.99 -> EUR 14.99) on the Mac App Store.
Website (+free trial)
Glimpses on the Mac App Store (>35% off)

flickery

flickery is a fully-featured flickr client for your Mac.

Organize your photos quickly and easily with drag and drop, sort your galleries, upload and download, and more!

For Black Friday, flickery is over 25% off (USD 14.99 -> USD 10.99; EUR 17.99 -> EUR 12.99) on the Mac App Store.

Website (+free trial)
flickery on the Mac App Store (>25% off)

Enjoy 🤗

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If you’re using Yoink for iPad and iPhone’s Clipboard Monitor – which, if active, automatically saves anything you copy from other apps, even if Yoink is completely in the background –, you’re probably familiar with this dialog since iOS 16:

While this is useful information for apps you wouldn’t expect to be pasting at that moment, if you’ve activated Yoink’s Clipboard Monitor, you don’t want to have to confirm each and every single paste operation – it can get annoying very quickly:

I did file a feedback with Apple for adding an option to “Always Allow” pastes during the early days of iOS 16, and thankfully, in iOS 16.1, they introduced exactly that:

How to enable Always Allow “Paste from Other Apps” for Yoink.

– Open Settings.app
– Scroll all the way down to Yoink and select it
– Tap on Paste from Other Apps
– Select Allow

With this enabled (you can revoke it at any time using the same steps), you go from the confirmation-hell above to this:

When copying now, Yoink’s Clipboard Monitor picks up the copied item right away, without confirmation. A notification that a paste occurred is displayed.

You’ll still get notified that Yoink pasted from the source app, but you won’t need to confirm the paste each time 🥲

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Just a quick note that since the betas (!) of macOS Ventura 13.0, configuration of 3rd-party widgets is broken, which, of course, means that Yoink’s widget’s configuration does currently not work, and I cannot do anything about it. Let’s hope Apple fixes it soon, macOS 13.0.1 didn’t bring any improvement in this regard.

Here’s a quick video of what I mean:

Again, in my testing, this not only was the case for Yoink’s widget, but a widespread issue over all sorts of 3rd-party widgets, although I do believe that dynamically app-supplied values work. It might only be static values that are affected by this.

At some point in iPadOS 16’s beta, this same bug occurred, but that was fixed before release. I guess the fix didn’t make it into macOS.
Maybe it’s time for another “Back to the Mac” event.

UPDATE (Dec 14th, 2022)

This is still an issue on macOS 13.1 (22C65). Quite embarrassing for Apple.

UPDATE (Jan 24th, 2023)

macOS 13.2 (22D49) seems to have finally fixed the issue – although it *did* take an initial

killall Notification\ Centre

to kickstart the widgets after adding and configuring them. But after that, it seems to work reliably.

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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!

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