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2 ScreenFloat Icon 3  dragged

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of ScreenFloat v1.5.14 – an admittedly long overdue maintenance update that fixes a couple of issues:

  • A semi-rare crash, that occurred when dragging the mini-icon of a floating shot, was fixed
  • Cancelling a mini-icon-drag by pressing ‘esc’ actually works now
  • Fixed a bug where a cleared keyboard shortcut would reset to its default after a restart of the app
  • Fixed an interface bug where, after sharing a shot, the standard window buttons would appear on the floating shot
  • Fixed a bug where the app would seemingly freeze when “Save as…” and “New Folder” was selected

What’s ScreenFloat?
ScreenFloat lets you take screenshots that float above all windows, so as to keep information always visible (following you around different spaces, windows and full-screen apps).

  • Need to transfer bank account information from a mail to your online banking tool? ScreenFloat!
  • Want to keep a reference image visible? ScreenFloat!
  • Want to just remember a bit of information for a minute? ScreenFloat!
  • The use-cases seem endless (and *are* endless – believe me, I use it all day, all the time 😉 )

While the main “raison d’être” is this floating functionality, ScreenFloat offers a Shots Browser that keeps all the screenshots you take in a neat library you can curate (via titles, tags and (smart) collections).

Each floating shot has a draggable mini-image-icon at the lower left, so you can quickly drag any screenshot you take to other apps, like Messages, Mail, or Twitter, for example.

Links:
ScreenFloat Website (with free, 15-day trial)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store

What’s Next?
Looking ahead, I’m working on a substantial v2.0 upgrade of ScreenFloat which will include features like annotations and sync (via iCloud), and I’m also looking into an iOS companion app down the road.
So, although there haven’t been a lot of updates lately for ScreenFloat (mainly because Yoink has been keeping me very busy), I do have lots of plans and love for the app.

 

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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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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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