Yoink for iPhone and iPad is your files and snippet shelf for anything you can drag, copy, share, or download. Version 2.5.4 improves its Files app integration, cleans up the UI a bit and makes a bunch of improvements and fixes.
What is Yoink?
Yoink for iPhone and iPad stores anything you can throw at it: file drags, content like images or text, eMails, downloads, and more. It syncs across your iOS devices. It can automatically store anything you copy – even if Yoink is in the background – with its Picture-in-Picture Clipboard Monitor. It lets you “pin” PDFs, eMails, Websites, Images, and more in Picture-in-Picture for reference in any app. It integrates with your Files app. It lets you build powerful Shortcuts. It’s there when you need it.
What’s New in Yoink v2.5.4?
In the Files app, Yoink now only shows the highest-fidelity representation of a file instead of all of them1, making it easier to navigate and select files
New contextual menu items in the Files app allow you to copy the contents of a file (as opposed to the file path), or a plain text representation of rich text formats
The stability and performance of the app have been improved, while fixing a few bugs and UI issues
For instance, a rtf “rich text” file in Yoink has its rich text data representation, as well as a plain text one. Previously, Yoink would show this file as two files inside a container folder in Files.app, now it’s one file: the rtf. ↩︎
alternate clickbaity title: the update I learned Swift and SwiftUI for.
I’m happy to announce Yoink for Mac v3.6.5’s immediate availability. In addition to numerous quality-of-life improvements and adjustments, this update re-introduces the (judging from the inquiries I received about it) beloved Clipboard History feature, and its widget.
What’s Yoink?
Yoink offers you a temporary place (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.
Yoink automatically appears at the edge of your screen when you start a drag a file, allowing you to place it there.
What’s New in Yoink v3.6.5?
Let’s talk about the most important thing first – the resurrected clipboard history and its widget. Up until earlier this year, I had virtually no experience with Swift, let alone SwiftUI, and I was pretty happy to continue with my Objective-anCient ways. But I realized it held me back. Things are clearly moving away from Objective-C and towards Swift, so at the beginning of this year (2022), I made a point of learning the basics of Swift as quickly as possible to have the option of using everything Apple’s platforms and APIs have to offer.
With macOS Big Sur, Apple got rid of its old-style Today Widgets (which could be written in Objective-C and a nice .xib-interface file) and brought over the new SwiftUI-style widgets from iOS. That’s why Yoink’s widget had been defunct for so long – I didn’t have the skills to replace it.
But enough chit-chat, here’s the nitty-gritty!
While the clipboard history recording still happens in Yoink itself in the background, the widget provides quick access to previous copies. It comes in two sizes: medium and large. The medium widget shows up to 6 copied objects, the large one up to 12.
Widget Configurability
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but you can have multiple widgets, and they can be configured to show 1) the most recent copies (medium: 1-6, large: 1-12) 2) older copies (medium: 7-12, large: 13-24) 3) oldest copies (medium: 13-18, large: 25-36)
So you can, for example, have one large and one medium widget to show the last 18 copied items, or three large widgets to show the last 36 copied items.
Apart from that, you can have the widget show only particular data types:
1) Only copied images 2) Only copied text 3) Only copied links 4) Only copied files 5) All copied items 6) Only pinned copies (pinning copied items is new in Yoink v3.6.5)
That allows the widget to be very flexible and useful.
How to use the Widget (Widget Clicks and Tricks)
– Click on an item in the widget, and it is copied to your clipboard – Option(⌥)-click on an item, and it gets sent to Yoink so you can drag it out at a later time – Shift(⇧)-click on an item, and it gets pinned (new in v3.6.5) – Command(⌘)-click on an item, and it is revealed in the Clipboard History Browser (new in v3.6.5)
Pinning Items (new in v3.6.5)
A pinned item in the widget
When the Clipboard History reaches its threshold (up to 36 items), it will begin clearing out the oldest copies to make place for new ones. In some cases, you might want to hold on to items indefinitely. That’s why you can now pin them. A pinned item will not be cleared out, unless you unpin it or delete it manually.
Clipboard History Browser (new in v3.6.5)
The history browser gives you a simple way to organize your copied items. Pin, unpin, delete, send to Yoink, copy, or clear out the entire history.
If you’d like to learn more about some of the implementation details behind this new widget, here’s a blog post for you.
What else is new in Yoink v3.6.5?
– It raises the minimum system requirements from macOS 10.10 Yosemite to macOS 10.12 Sierra. – Instead of a TIFF file, a PNG file is created when pasting image data into Yoink. In that vain, Yoink also transparently provides PNG and JPEG data when dragging out images of the types HEIC, HEIF or TIFF to broaden compatibility with other apps. – It also fixes a couple of bugs and improves compatibility with, among other apps, DEVONthink, where items dragged from DEVONthink to Yoink and then out of Yoink are no longer moved, but copied, to ensure the integrity of DEVONthink’s files database.
What do I need to use Yoink for Mac?
Yoink runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and requires macOS Sierra 10.12 or newer. It’s localized in English, German, French, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
Where can I get Yoink?
Free Demo(direct download, ~28 MB, 30 days, notarized by Apple) Mac App Store($7.99, one-time purchase, no in-app purchases, update free for existing customers, as it’s been the case since v1.0) Mac Productivity Bundle(Mac App Store, 25% off Yoink, Transloader and ScreenFloat) Setapp(subscription service with over 200 Mac apps)
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.
With iOS 14 comes a new privacy feature – a little banner at the top that shows you whenever an app accesses the clipboard.
I recently was asked in a tweet whether this was a bug. It’s not. It’s a feature 😉
But please let me explain in a little more detail what Yoink is doing here exactly.
Yoink accesses the clipboard without direct user-input in three cases:
Case 1 – Yoink’s Clipboard Bar
As you can see in the screenshot above, Yoink displays a small bar with the contents of the clipboard, allowing you to quickly store that content in Yoink (or, if it’s a URL pointing to a file, download that URL in Yoink).
To be able to display this bar, Yoink asks the clipboard whether it has new contents. It asks once when the app is put into the foreground, or regularly, in an interval whenever Yoink is used as a Side-by-Side or Slide-Over app (to be able to update the contents of the bar).
The clipboard bar comes in three settings (which can be changed in Settings.app > Yoink) :
Ask
This will make the clipboard bar appear whenever something new is on the clipboard (and will “monitor” the clipboard when the app is used as Slide-Over or Side-by-Side)
Automatically store
This turns off the clipboard bar, but will still check the clipboard for new content and automatically store it in Yoink.
Never
Turns off the clipboard bar and the auto-store feature, so the clipboard isn’t accessed
What I’m changing about this with the next update
Right now, the default setting is 1 – Always Ask for new clipboard content. This I want to keep, because I believe it to be a nice feature (and I’ve seen it used a lot).
However, I’m making it more obvious to turn it off, as you currently have to navigate into the Settings.app to change it.
So, whenever the ‘x’ button is pressed (to tell Yoink no, don’t store the clipboard’s current content right now), I’m asking the user directly if they’d like to keep the bar, turn it off, or always store new content automatically.
It’ll look something like this, after the bar has been dismissed:
Case 2 – The Add from Clipboard Button
In Yoink’s top left corner sits the Add from Clipboard button. It is either active or not. To enable and disable it, Yoink queries the clipboard’s contents regularly (if it’s used in Slide-Over or Side-by-Side), and thus also causes the “clipboard accessed alert” to be shown.
It’s just a UI thing I thought would be neat, but ultimately, it’s unnecessary.
What I’m changing about this with the next update
I’ll remove the clipboard checking for this button and display an alert instead if there was nothing to be pasted on the clipboard.
Case 3 – Download a URL
Whenever you select “Download URL” from Yoink’s “+” menu, Yoink will check your pasteboard to see if you’ve copied a URL. If there is a URL, it’ll insert it automatically for you, if there isn’t, it leaves the URL field empty (and ignores the clipboard, of course).
What I’m changing about this with the next update
In iOS 14, Apple provides new API which allows developers to see if there might be a URL on the clipboard without actually accessing it. I’ll be using this going forward.
I hope that clears things up about Yoink’s usage of your clipboard.
And just to reiterate: I’m not interested in anybody’s data at all, and you can review my privacy policy here.
