mac app

Yoink Mac App Icon

Just a quick note to let you know that Yoink 3.4.1 is now available for download from the Mac App Store. It’s a free upgrade for everyone who’s purchased it before. You can download a 15-day trial for the app here.

Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac.

Moving a file with Yoink

When you start moving a file in Finder, or app-content like an image from a website, Yoink appears at the edge of your screen, offering a temporary place for you to drag the files to. Without having to keep the mouse button pressed, you can now get to the destination of your file quicker and easier.

What’s New in Yoink v3.4.1?

This version is a maintenance update, improving compatibility with a lot of apps (like Apple Mail and Photos, and many 3rd party apps) and increases the overall stability and performance of the app, for example, it fixes a bug that caused Yoink to no longer work until a restart of the app in some cases.

Pricing and Availability

Yoink 3.4.1 is available for purchase on the Mac App Store for the price of $6.99 / £6.99 / €7,99. It is a free update for existing customers of the app. You can download a free, 15-day demo version here, even if you’ve tried Yoink before. Yoink runs on Macs with OS X Lion 10.7.3 or newer. OS X Yosemite or newer is recommended.

If you’re interested in writing about Yoink, you can download the press kit here, which contains screenshots, links to a short video and further information.
Promo codes are available to members of the press at press (at) eternalstorms (dot) at.

Yoink is also available for iPad and iPhone.

Yoink Usage Tips

To get the most out of Yoink, I’m collecting useful tips and tricks for you on this website.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to see what you think about Yoink v3.4.1. If you like the app, please consider leaving a little review on the Mac App Store, it would help me out a lot! Should you have trouble with it or have any feedback or questions, please be sure to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you! Thank you.

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Earlier today, I released Yoink 3.4 for Mac with supposed “PopClip by Pilotmoon Software” Integration.
Only that it doesn’t work, because I screwed up. My sincere apologies, it worked in testing but I managed to remove it from my Mac App Store submission by mistake, so the button does effectively nothing.

So, here’s how to fix it:
Instead of using Yoink’s “Install PopClip Extension” button in Yoink’s preferences (which is, on top of everything, badly aligned – because it’s just that kind of day for me), download the extension below and double-click it. If you have PopClip by Pilotmoon Software installed, it’ll do the right thing and ask you if you’d like to install it.

 – Download Yoink’s PopClip Extension – (then double-click in Finder)
(A logout/login or restart of your Mac might be necessary for macOS to recognize Yoink’s new system service)

Again, my apologies, this wasn’t how I wanted this to go 😉

I hope you enjoy Yoink besides this little hiccup, you can be sure it’ll be fixed with the next update!

– Matt

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One of Yoink v3.3‘s new features is the detection of favicons for webloc files dragged into the app, making it easier to quickly identify individual weblocs at a glance. (A webloc file is something Finder creates when you drag a URL/link to it).
Think of it as QuickLook icon previews, just for websites:

Yoink with webloc files without favicons

weblocs without favicons

Yoink with webloc files with favicons

weblocs with favicons

The advantage is obvious right away, that’s why I jumped on it the second the feature was suggested to me.

Optional Setting

Even though I really like favicon detection and have it enabled on my Mac, I decided right at the start that favicon detection would be opt-in (disabled by default), for a couple of reasons:

  1. It requires an internet connection
  2. It uses data (very little, but still)
  3. I thought I’d use a Google Service for this (which I discarded after the prototype) and wasn’t comfortable having users use it without their “consent”

1) Internet Connection

Yoink is not an app that should require an internet connection at all.
It’s a “local” Mac app, it helps you with drag and drop, why need an internet connection?

As a side note, the connection itself actually doesn’t happen in the main Yoink app, it’s an XPC service that has the sandbox privilege, so the main app isn’t affected.

2) Data Volume

A Mac usually connects to the internet over WiFi or an Ethernet connection, and the data transferred for favicons *is* very small.
But there’s still a chance you’re using weblocs like crazy on a Mac connected to the internet via your iPhone’s Personal Hotspot on a data plan, which also makes it obvious why the user needs to be able to turn this option on and off.

It just made me more comfortable to have users opt-in to this option, instead of opt-out.

3a) Google?

Google has a nice favicon detection service, which is just a URL you pass another URL into to receive the image data:

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain_url=PERCENT-ESCAPED-URL

There’ no need to parse the HTML yourself for the URL to the favicon, Google does it all for you.

3b) So Why Not Google?

What if the service goes away?
With Google having a bad rep for some users, would they use this feature?
What about privacy? (I don’t know, but they might collect your IP and then know what URL a favicon was loaded for, etc.)

So even though it worked very nicely, I decided to implement it myself.

Getting the Favicon

With Google out of the picture, I had to roll my own detection and parsing.
What I do is actually very, very simple.

I load the webloc’s URL’s HTML content, and then look through the header part.
In particular, I look for one of the following lines:

rel=“apple-touch-icon”
rel=“shortcut icon”
rel=“icon”
rel=“apple-touch-icon-precomposed”

in that order. (I’m sure there are more I could go through, but those were the ones that I came across while testing.)
Should none of those exist, I just try something like:

•) http:// … /favicon.ico
•)  …/favicon.png
•) rinse and repeat for every image format you can think of

If I have no luck there, either, I bail and return macOS’ default webloc icon.

If I am lucky and I find a “rel” I’m interested in, I figure out what the href contains (an absolute link to the image, a relative path to the image, or just the name of the image file itself). Once I know that, I can load the image file and composite it into the final icon.

The final icon is cached so Yoink won’t have to connect to the internet and re-download favicons for weblocs that point to the same base URL.

Drawing the “personalized” webloc icon

I went through three iterations, each at its own, unique laziness level.

Iteration 1, laziness level 3 (extremely lazy)

Just show the favicon:

Iteration 1 of Favicons in Yoink

No wonder I didn’t use it. It’s so lazy.
Second, it doesn’t even remotely resemble a webloc file anymore. It actually looks more like an image file’s QuickLook preview icon, and that’s a bad thing, as it could very possibly confuse users.

So I went on to

Iteration 2, laziness level 2 (pretty lazy)

Show the favicon super-imposed on the webloc icon:

Yoink Favicon Icon Iteration 2

That’s better. But not good, either. Favicons can be transparent, like the one here, but they can also be opaque, blocking the WEBLOC text in the icon and making the overall icon look more blocky and less nice.

Onwards and upwards!

Iteration 3, laziness level 1 (not that lazy)

Crop out the “Safari” part of the webloc icon and paint the favicon below it:

Yoink Favicon Icon Iteration 3

If the favicon is transparent, I draw it on top of a white background (so it would fit with the rest of the original webloc icon), if it’s not transparent, the favicon’s background is used, solving everybody’s problems. And you can still see that it’s a webloc file, at first glance!

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Working on Transloader 3, I wanted to re-implement the Finder’s Open With… contextual menu:

The Finder's Open With contextual menu

Getting the apps in there turned out to be the easy part. What took some effort was the “App Store…” menu item, as I wanted to precisely replicate its functionality.

Transloader 3's Open With contextual menu

Right-click a file in Finder, select Open With -> App Store…, and it will launch the Mac App Store with a UTI search, for example: uti:public.zip-archive.
This will give you a list of all apps available in the Mac App Store that can handle that file type. Neat!

The ‘macappstores’ URL scheme

The Mac App Store app luckily offers a URL scheme:

  • macappstores://
    Launches the Mac App Store
  • macappstores://showUpdatesPage
    Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to your Updates page
  • macappstores://showPurchasesPage
    Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to your Purchased page
  • macappstores://itunes.apple.com/app/idYOURAPPID
    Launches the Mac App Store and takes you directly to the product page, identified by the product ID

That’s very practical, but not what I was looking for. I was in need of a way to start a search the way Finder does.

In order to find out the URL Finder uses, I wrote a quick throwaway-app that would overtake the Mac App Store’s URL schemes (using LSSetDefaultHandlerForURLScheme) and print out the URL that was opened.
Alas – no dice. Apparently, Finder uses Apple Events or some other magic that “can not be used in a third-party sandboxed app anyway”™ to do its bidding.

After googling the issue, I found a URL that supposedly worked: macappstores://ax.search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?q=searchterm, but just to pour more salt into an already wide-open wound, it only worked on pre-10.9 systems:

The search URL in 10.9-and-beyond systems

Another dead end. Or was it?
I guess I should have experimented with that URL a little, because Jan Vitturi (@jan4843 on twitter) had the answer: just remove “ax.” from the URL, and it works (on both pre-10.9 and post-10.9 systems)!

Using this URL:
macappstores://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?q=searchterm
I was able to get a search going on the Mac App Store, right from within my app.

Sadly, there’s a caveat.
I can’t do a UTI search this way. When I pass (even a percent-escaped) search term along the lines of ‘uti:public.zip-archive’, the Mac App Store tells me there are no results. Reloading that very same page then does show the results – weird and annoying, but nothing I was able to work around.
Using extension:zip seemed to work a little better, but still didn’t return all results a reload would.

Jan Vitturi to the rescue again – the URL’s a little different for UTI or extension searches:
macappstores://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/docTypeLookup?uti=youruti

Alternatively, instead of uti=…, you can use extension=… to search by file path extensions.

My sincere thanks go to Jan Vitturi!

 

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