Transloader v3.1.6 is now available. The update improves the placement and display of the popover if you use the app’s menu bar icon, syncing and handling of download states, and the visual feedback when adding a download to the local Mac. Additionally, it fixes a localization issue in the “Added from device” informational overlay.
With Transloader, you manage downloads on your Macs, remotely from your iPhones, iPads, and other Macs.
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!
Transloader – an app that lets you start downloads on your Macs, remotely from your iPhones, iPads, and other Macs – is now available in version 3.1.1 for both macOS and iOS.
v3.1.1 is a maintenance update which includes minor improvements and fixes. – Now remembers previously selected Macs in Transloader and its Share extension – The “local” Mac is now included in the Add Download dialogs – Improved imagery for Macs and iOS devices – Improved behavior of Transloader’s popover (when used as a menu bar app) – Improved positioning of Transloader’s popover if the menu bar item is currently being truncated by macOS
– Fixes a bug where sometimes clearing all data from Transloader’s iCloud would fail – Fixes a bug where copying preferences over from another Mac would confuse Transloader into thinking it is that other Mac – Reduces the frequency of the appearance of rating requests from 6 to 9 months (if there’s been an update in between)
Yoink for iPad and iPhone v2.4.1 is now available on the App Store. It’s a maintenance update, improving its Clipboard Monitor, certain areas of its UI, as well as general performance and stability.
Yoink is a file- and snippet “shelf”, in a “hold this for me while I do something else for a while” sort of way. Anything you can drag, copy, share or download, you can store in Yoink. When you eventually need it, you can access files either directly from within the app, Yoink’s custom keyboard, and Siri Shortcuts. It also syncs across your iOS devices via iCloud.
What’s New in Yoink v2.4.1?
+ Improvements to Yoink’s Background Clipboard Monitor
When active, the Clipboard Monitor will save anything you copy or cut in other apps, even if Yoink itself is in the background.
v2.4.1 now allows you to start, pause, update and end your Clipboard Monitor sessions with Siri Shortcuts. By “update”, I mean you can change its timeout, and which data type it should look out for (everything, links, texts or images).
In Settings.app > Yoink > Clipboard Monitor, you can enable Display Last Saved Item, which will show the item the Clipboard Monitor last stored in Yoink in its Picture-in-Picture overlay.
Also in Settings.app > Yoink > Clipboard Monitor, you can disable Confirm Monitoring, which, when starting the Clipboard Monitor from within Yoink, will forego all confirmation dialogs and start the Clipboard Monitor right away, as requested by a number of users.
The Clipboard Monitor can now be started from Yoink’s Home Screen Quick Actions
Lastly, instead of terminating the Clipboard Monitor entirely when a time out occurs, it now pauses instead, making it easier to restart it.
+ General Improvements
Downloads now show their state if Use Small Previews is enabled in Settings.app > Yoink > Appearance
Downloads now show the size of the download, if available
The UI for renaming files has been revamped to use more space
Editing a URL now refreshes its icon
Yoink’s Share extension now works faster
Maps/Location items are now a separate option in Yoink’s filter (accessible by tapping Showing All at the bottom)
Many bug- and crash fixes
Where can I get Yoink?
Yoink is available for iPad and iPhone on the App Store – a one-time purchase of $5.99 / € 5,99 / £ 4.99. It requires iOS 14 or newer. To sync across your iOS devices, an iCloud account is required.
