clipboard

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)

Yoink is also available for iPad and iPhone

For members of the press or anyone else who is interested, here’s a press kit.

I hope you like the update. If you have any feedback or questions, please do not hesitate to write me – I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Enjoy 😊

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After releasing Yoink v2.3, which brought the app up-to-speed on all things iOS 15, I have another great update out for Yoink for iPad and iPhone, which allows you to make the app monitor your clipboard in the background and save almost anything you copy or cut.

Background Clipboard Monitoring

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.

Links

Yoink for iPad and iPhone Website
Yoink on the iOS App Store
Yoink for iOS Usage Tips
Yoink for iOS Press Kit (.zip download)

Yoink is also available for Mac:
Yoink for Mac Website
Yoink on the Mac App Store
Yoink for Mac Usage Tips
Yoink for Mac Press Kit (.zip download)

I hope you enjoy Yoink’s recent updates. If you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to mail me, I’d love to hear it!

Stay healthy and safe!

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With iOS 14 comes a new privacy feature – a little banner at the top that shows you whenever an app accesses the clipboard.

Screenshot of iOS 14's Simulator showing the clipboard alert banner

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) :

  1. 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)
  2. Automatically store
    This turns off the clipboard bar, but will still check the clipboard for new content and automatically store it in Yoink.
  3. 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:

Screenshot of new settings options

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).

Screenshot of Yoink's Download URL UI

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.

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