drag’n’drop

It’s here.
After an unnecessarily long, extended time in App Review, I’m so happy to be able to tell you that Yoink for iPad and iPhone with iOS 11 is now finally available on the App Store.

What’s Yoink for iPad and iPhone?

Yoink strives to improve and simplify drag and drop and speed up your workflow.
It accepts almost anything you can drag, copy or share on your iPad and stores it for later use. This way, your fingers are free for more important things.

Here’s a quick YouTube video of how it works (check your sound, there’s some music) :

How can I add stuff to Yoink?

Obviously, especially on iPad, Yoink was designed for drag’n’drop use, and using it as a Slide-Over or Side-by-Side app, I’d say that’s the best way to use it. Just slide Yoink over any app you’re in and drag to it anything you need later. Then slide it back out, if it’s in your way.
There are, however, other ways to add items to Yoink. It can grab the contents from your clipboard and it offers a Action / Share extension, so that whenever you use a Share sheet in iOS, you can add that shared item to Yoink – no drag and drop required. The app doesn’t even have to run.

How do I get stuff out of Yoink?

That’s just as easy. Either use drag and drop, or copy the items, or share them from within the app.
Yoink comes with a custom keyboard extension, which lets you use items you’ve stored in Yoink without having to leave the active app you’re currently editing text in – just switch to Yoink’s keyboard and drag out (or copy, if you’re on iPhone) the items to the destination in your text.
All items in Yoink are indexed by Spotlight, so you can use the system-wide search to find items. The results are draggable as well.

Yoink Custom Keyboard

How are items in Yoink represented?

Yoink creates a rich preview for every item you add, so that, at a glance, easy identification is possible (for example, web link items show part of the website, map locations show a preview using Apple Maps).
A full look at the item is available by tapping onto the item.

Deleting Items

Yoink doesn’t delete items right away. Instead, like in Photos.app, items you drag out of Yoink or delete are put into the Trash, where they remain for a specified amount of time, after which they’re really deleted.
So should you find you still need an item, you can restore it right away.

Pricing and Availability

Yoink for iOS is available on the App Store right now, for the introductory price of $2.99 (€3,49) – it will rise in November.
An iPad or iPhone with iOS 11 is required.

Yoink is also available on the Mac, and for the occasion, its price has also been reduced for a limited time! 🙂

Links

Yoink for iPad and iPhone Website: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/ios
Yoink for iOS Usage Tips: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/ios/tips
Yoink for iPad and iPhone on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1260915283?mt=8
Yoink for iOS Press Kit: https://eternalstorms.at/press/Yoink-iPad-1-Press-Kit.zip

Yoink for Mac Website: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/mac
Yoink for Mac Usage Tips: https://eternalstorms.at/yoink/mac/tips
Yoink on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id457622435?mt=12
Yoink for Mac Press Kit: https://eternalstorms.at/press/Yoink-3-Press-Kit.zip

Delay of Release

I had planned and was ready for releasing Yoink for iPad together with iOS 11, on September 19th, 2017. As you may know, that didn’t work out. The app was ready, I was set, but App Review wasn’t happy with the app and so I missed the date, while other, let’s say similar apps, were allowed in.
After a lot of discussion by mail and phone with the App Review team, and having to remove some things from the app, Yoink was finally approved yesterday.

Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy the app 🙂 Please spread the word and if you have the time and like the app, please consider leaving a little review on the App Store – it would mean a lot to me!

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YoinkIcon

Presenting: Yoink – taking the drag out of drag and drop

Functionality

Have you ever tried dragging something from, say, Finder, to a fullscreen app in Lion? It’s a pain. This is where Yoink comes in. Every time you start dragging a file, Yoink shows a window you can drag those files to. Then you just switch to the space or fullscreen app you’d like to drop the files to and drag them out of Yoink to the app. Very simple. There’s a video on the website which does a pretty good job at explaining what Yoink does, exactly.

The idea behind Yoink

The idea came to me while trying to drag a file from Finder to a new message in fullscreen Mail.app. I just couldn’t do it. Then I tried to drag images from Finder to Xcode in fullscreen. Not very easy either. Thus, Yoink was born.

The name

The original app for this little app was DragHelper. Yes, I know – why did I ever change it?
Well, I was watching the Simpsons, in the episode where Bart takes the last Doughnut or bearclaw or whatever it was from Kent Brockman’s plate by exclaiming “Yoink!” (to which Brockman asks himself: Yoink?!?) and I thought – that’d be a great name for an app that “yoinks” the dragged files.

Why Lion only?

The main reason is because I didn’t see the problem on Snow Leopard. The other reason is that I really wanted to try out the new NSTableView view-based APIs 🙂 They’re very nice and shiny.

The menu bar icon controversy

The number one request I get from customers is to put in an option to remove the menu bar icon (the black down arrow). Well, I didn’t want it in there in the first place.
The first time I submitted Yoink to the Mac App Store, it got rejected because it didn’t have a way to quit the app if Yoink’s window wasn’t visible (the rejection note stated (somewhat paraphrased) “The app can’t be quit if the window is not visible”).

So I thought to myself: what’s the least obtrusive way to make it quittable at any given time _without_ putting an icon in the menu bar. Because why for the sweet love of God would Yoink need a menu bar icon? It’s a background app, for crying out loud.
So I put in a global hotkey for quitting Yoink and made it clear in the splash screen. Submitted it again.

Another rejection followed. This time, the rejection note stated “There needs to be a menu bar or an application menu or a status menu to include a quit item” (why this wasn’t stated in the first rejection is beyond me, but to err is human, and I’ve erred quite a couple of times, so I’m not complaining). Since it’s a background app, the first two were not possible, since background apps do not have their own menu bars – the only thing that was left was the menu bar icon. So I put it in there, and that was that.

Since I was pressed for time, I didn’t implement an option to hide the menu bar icon, but believe me, the upcoming update will include such an option. As I said, I don’t want that menu bar icon either. I just don’t see it make any sense.

The no launch on login controversy

The second most requested feature was to add a “Add to login items” button in Yoink’s preferences.
I tried to implement it, but in the sandbox environment of Lion, in which Yoink is running, it is currently not possible to do. I’ll have to wait until Apple fixes this until I can implement it.

Pricing and availability

Yoink is available exclusively through the Mac App Store for $2.99/€2.39. A free 15-day trial is available at the website (direct download link)

As always, I very much appreciate your feedback, bug reports and feature requests, so please keep them coming 🙂

Thank you and enjoy,
Matthias

Yoink for iPad and iPhone now available – Improve and Simplify Drag and Drop