App of the Week: Yoink

Yoink is the macOS Shelf Utility I Want on iOS Too

 

 

BY JOHN VOORHEES of MacStories

At WWDC, I was disappointed that the iOS 11 announcements didn’t include a shelf where content can be temporarily parked. When Federico and Sam Beckett made an iOS 11 concept video earlier this year they included a shelf, which felt like a natural way to make touch-based drag and drop simpler. I found the omission in the iOS 11 beta somewhat surprising. On the Mac, people use the Desktop as a temporary place to stash items all the time, and without a Desktop on iOS, a shelf that slides in from the edge of the screen seemed like a natural solution. In fact, it’s a solution that has an even more direct analog than the Desktop on macOS that makes a solid case for implementing something similar on iOS: Yoink, from Eternal Storms Software.

Yoink, is one of my favorite macOS utilities that sits just out of sight until I start to drag something. There are many days when I have a bunch of apps open across at least a few different Spaces. If I need to send a file1 to someone in Slack or attach it to an email message, those apps may be buried under several layers of windows, in a different Space, or may not be open at all. Instead of starting a drag and using Alt+Tab to find the app to drop a file into if it’s even open, I can drop it onto Yoink as a temporary resting spot until I find the destination for which I’m looking. This is especially useful when I’m using an email client and haven’t begun composing a new message yet.

As soon as I start dragging a file, Yoink fades into view. I have it docked to the middle of the right edge of my screen, but it can be anchored to the left edge too. You can also customize when Yoink appears. Instead of showing up as soon as a drag starts, you can set Yoink to wait until your drag approaches the side of the screen where it’s docked. You can even have a little Yoink window show up near your cursor as soon as the drag starts to minimize how far you need to move the file. As soon as you drop the file on the Yoink drop point, it re-attaches itself to the side of your screen.

Once a file is sitting on Yoink’s shelf, you can pin it there. I’ve begun doing this with a few files I need throughout the day when I’m working with MacStories and AppStories sponsors. After I pin the file, I can drag it out of Yoink and into an email message as many times as I want, which is faster than digging back through layers of folders in the Finder. If I don’t want to see it sitting there in Yoink on the edge of my screen all day, I press F5, which hides the Yoink window until I toggle it again.

There is a preview button next to each item on Yoink’s shelf that can be used to take a quick look at its contents. You can also share and open items using a variety of apps on your Mac by right clicking on any file stored in Yoink. If you decide you no longer need the files sitting in Yoink, click the ‘x’ button next to individual items or the broom icon to remove all of them at once. Right-clicking on Yoink or clicking its gear icon also gives you the option to bring back the last removed files if you clear out any by accident.

Multiple items dragged onto Yoink become a separate stack of files. Instead of a preview button, a split icon appears next to a stack, which unpacks the stack into separate items when clicked. Yoink also supports a customizable Force Touch gesture that can be set to select all the files in Yoink, reveal a file in Finder, pin and unpin the file in Yoink, or trigger the preview/stack-split button.

One final trick I like to use with Yoink is an Alfred workflow. It’s a simple workflow that deposits files found via Alfred onto Yoink’s shelf without having to take my hands off the keyboard. After triggering Alfred’s text field, I type a space, which triggers a file search. When I’ve located the file I want, I tap the right arrow key to reveal the available file actions. I pick Yoink, and the file magically appears on its shelf. The workflow is perfect for finding multiple files quickly.

 

Like a lot of utilities, Yoink isn’t something you need, but if you try it, you may find it’s something you want. Everything Yoink can do can also be done another way with the Finder, but it makes working with files on your Mac easier and faster. It’s a shortcut that saves seconds over and over, which adds up to real time over the course of weeks and months.

Yoink is also why I’m disappointed there’s no shelf in iOS 11. Dragging files around iOS 11 is a two-handed operation not unlike grabbing a file on macOS and maintaining the drag until you find the destination you want. As a result, it’s not surprising that iOS drag and drop works the way it does, but iOS 11 is an opportunity for a fresh look at how files are moved across the OS and to improve the way it’s accomplished. It doesn’t look like that will happen this year, but I’d love to see Apple take a cue from Yoink and implement an iOS shelf someday. Until that happens, I’m optimistic that we’ll see third-party developers tackle the problem.

Yoink is available on the Mac App Store. If you want to try the app first, you can download a trial version from Eternal Storms’ website.

 

Do you have any suggestions for features to add to iOS? Tell us about them in the comments below!

Weekly Round Up 8/11

 

 

I’m gonna file this under “Doh!”
How to get fired in the tech industry

And the backlash continues…
Tech leaders must stop treating humanity like computer code

I’m ashamed to admit to owning most of the items on this list.
9 tech crazes that made us lose our minds in the ’90s

Everything old is new again.
3 Things Women in Tech Must Do to Get Ahead

Why didn’t they just buy Netflix?
Disney bought baseball’s tech team to take on Netflix

Shouldn’t this guy be in jail already?
Martin Shkreli’s ‘stealthy’ tech start-up has a website and says it’s starting to test products

What the WHAT?!
Wild new microchip tech could grow brain cells on your skin

App of the Week: LiquidText 3.0.11 changes how you annotate documents on the iPad

It’s hard to go back to an more ordinary PDF annotator after using LiquidText, but it is not the ultimate PDF tool for the iPad.

By Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher of Apple Insider

We’d be doing you and LiquidText a disservice if we just called it a PDF editor but at its heart, that is what it is. It’s so much more than that, though, that the PDF element seems almost incidental. LiquidText 3.0.11 for iOS is about gathering ideas and making something useful out of them.

 

You can do regular PDF work in it. Just as you might with Adobe Acrobat or PDFpen, you can create PDFs and edit them to at least some degree. You can annotate them, too, and that’s where LiquidText starts to show its muscle.

It handles PDFs of course but also Word and PowerPoint files. Open one of these in LiquidText on your iPad and it first turns it into a PDF. So if you just wanted to convert that Word document into one, you’ve just done it.

By far the app’s most striking feature, though, is how you can pinch to collapse parts of your document. It makes a PDF act like an outline except rather than levels that you elect to see or hide, you pinch your fingers together and it squishes up everything in between.

 

Say you’re writing a screenplay and you feel a character isn’t working out. Find their first scene, excerpt that by just dragging the text to the work space, and keep referring to it as you read through their other scenes.

That workspace can as big as you want it to, and it shrinks as much as you care to pinch it. Collate lots of elements on it or just the one: whatever you need to get your ideas moving around in your head.

This pinching, this squeezing of lines is a little startling at first: it looks like there’s a problem with your iPad’s screen. Yet once you’ve found and used it, you keep coming back to it.

If you’re more of a corporate type and have to deal with pie charts, excerpt one the same way. Circle it, drag it out to the workspace and keep it there. Annotate it with handwritten notes. It’s easier to scribble a line over your document and then handwrite on the workspace but you can also choose to create text boxes that you then drag around.

 

Drag together two elements on your workspace and they connect. Drag three, four or as many as you like and they all connect into one blob-like element.

It’s like you’ve got a messy desk with notes strewn and random lines doodled between them —except it’s a regulated mess and the lines are never random. LiquidText makes you feel like you’ve got a paper document that you can crumple, tear bits out, doodle all over and in every other way fold, spindle, and mangle it while you work to make the best thing you can.

Yes, Adobe Acrobat and PDFpen can do the boring stuff but LiquidText can be engrossing. There’s just this irony that an exquisitely gorgeous app lets you make such horrible messes of your documents in the interest of data access and editing.

But, what you do with that document afterwards? LiquidText files are really intended just for you, and to be a working document rather than something you prepare to send on to other people. You can share your LiquidText work over email and what your recipient gets depends on whether they’ve got LiquidText too.

If they have, then they get your scribbles in all their glory. If they haven’t, they get a PDF with a range of options regarding how much get to see or your working notes.

Means to an end, not the end itself

It’d be good to see LiquidText accept more types of documents and it’d be handy to at least refer to them on your iPhone.

LiquidText is not meant to be a PDF editor per se, you won’t use it to create much. It’s really for reading and doing intensive annotations and edits. Nonetheless, the way it does that makes you wish every PDF reader app with annotation features worked the same way.

We talked about sharing documents. It may not be a major hassle, as the app as it’s free to download. If you’re only ever going to read someone else’s LiquidText documents, it’s all you need.

But, to work on documents of more than a single page, you can buy the $4.99 multi-document in-app purchase. To get that plus all of the editing features, there’s the Pro version which is a $19.99 in-app purchase.

Try out the free version but skip the multi-document edition and go straight to the full version of LiquidText 3.0.11.

It’s an iPad-only app and though it doesn’t require an Apple Pencil, you’ll want one to get the most out of LiquidText.

What’s your favorite App for PDF editing and annotation? Tell us about it in the comments below!

How to: take photos even when your phone is out of storage

 

 

 

By Molly Sequin of Mashable

We’ve all been there. You get bombarded with “Storage Almost Full” notifications on your phone, but just keep rolling like the problem will magically fix itself. And then you hit that fateful moment: You try to snap a pic of that gorgeous vacation sunset and your phone says it literally can’t take one more picture.

There’s no time to start deleting everything, so you just don’t take the picture. Wrong. You life hack your way into the camera.

If you don’t actually want to pay for more storage and simply can’t get yourself to delete anything, here’s the move: All you have to do is take photos on some of your apps and save them to your phone.

 

My personal favorite app to use for this trick is Snapchat. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I already like to snap a lot of the things that I’m taking photos of anyway. So really, this method can make you more efficient even if your storage isn’t full. Here’s how you do it.

After you take a snap, there’s a little arrow over a bracket icon in the bottom lefthand corner of the screen. I took a snap at my desk and circled the “save” button in red in case you’re still confused.

 

When you hit that button, whatever you snapped will instantly be saved to your phone’s library. This works for videos, too, not just photos. I’ve been making Snapchat my undercover camera for quite some time now, and it has saved me during so many vacations, concerts, and big sporting events. The trick is definitely worth trying.

Now that you get the gist, start using almost all of your favorite social media apps to take photos when your camera tries to tell you it’s impossible. Facebook has an in-app camera that lets you save shots to your phone. Slack is another quick fix. Just take a photo within the app and send it in a slack (even if it’s just in a message to yourself). When it loads in the message, just hold it until a menu pops up. Click “save image” and go find it in your library.

Get in all of your other social apps and scope out how to take a photo in a pickle. Just be sure to allow all of your social apps access to your camera and microphone so you can actually take the photo or video in the first place.

If you actually want to get some storage back and take photos on your actual camera again, there’s a way. Here’s a guide to what you should delete first when looking for some extra room. But no matter what your storage is looking like, godspeed getting those pics!

Do you have a special hack for managing space on your phone? Share it with us in the comments below!

App of the Week: Photos

 

Apple’s Photos App Has a Hidden Feature for Tweaking Adjustments Even More

 

 

 

By Kirk McElhearn of Kirkville.com

I’ve been writing about Apple’s Photos app a lot lately, because I’ve decided to master this app rather than spending my time learning how to use Photoshop and Lightroom. Sure, those Adobe apps are powerful, but you can do a lot with Photos, and I’d rather spend my time taking pictures than tweaking them with complicated workflows and settings.

When you edit photos in Apple’s Photos app, by clicking the Adjust button, you see a number of sliders. They affect things like Brightness, Exposure, Contrast, and more. You click and drag the central lines of those sliders to increase or decrease each of these settings from -1.00 to +1.00.


 

However, if you press the Option key, then drag a slider, the scale increases, and you can move it from -2.00 to +2.00. Here’s what the Light adjustments look like after I’ve pressed the Option key and dragged the Brilliance slider.

You can also double-click any of the numbers that display on those sliders (this is tricky, since a single-click moves the slider; you may have to double-click a few times to get the number selected), and type a number from -2.00 to +2.00 to apply that setting.

And if you don’t like your adjustment, you can reset each slider by double-clicking anywhere on the slider (but not on the number that displays).

It’s probably rare that you’ll need to make such extreme adjustments, but it’s good to know that you can.

Do you have a favorite photo editing app? Tell us about it in the comments below!

How to: use iOS Mail’s auto unsubscribe feature

 

 

By Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac

If you find yourself on a mailing list that you either never signed up for, or just got sick of, then iOS Mail has you covered. The app has a built-in feature that detects emails from mailing lists, and offers to unsubscribe from them right there, without you having to visit the sender’s site and hunt for the unsubscribe option yourself, like some kind of spam-lackey.

Using Mail’s auto-unsubscribe feature

When Mail detects an email from a mailing list, it adds a banner at the top of the email offering to unsubscribe for you:

“This message is from a mailing list,” it says, with a blue Unsubscribe button underneath. Tap that, ands Mail goes to work:

 

It achieves this amazing feat by sending a reply to the sender. If everything works as planned, and the sender of the newsletter is a good internet citizen, you will be removed from their list.

As you can see from the various screenshots around this post, the trick works on both the iPhone and the iPad. It doesn’t currently work on the Mac, at least not on mine.

Manual and automatic alternatives to unsubscribe

Even if Mail fails to spot a mailing-list mail, you can often take care of it yourself. Just scroll to the very bottom of the email in question, and look for the word “unsubscribe,” usually written in teeny-tiny letters, and in pale gray on white (or an equally invisible color combo). Tap it, and you will usually be taken to a page which tells you that your attempt to unsubscribe was a success.

Sometimes, you’ll need to check a box to actually unsubscribe, which is going to far in my opinion. Either way, be aware that if a genuine spam mail got through, then tapping an unsubscribe link might verify you as a live human to the spammer.

The other option is to use a third-party service to manage your mail for you.

SaneBox

If an email newsletter keeps coming back, or if you’re getting spammy mails from PR folks who refuse to let you unsubscribe, then you could try SaneBox or something similar. Sanebox automatically files your mails into sensible categories, and filters out the real crap. It also has a great feature called Sane Black Hole. It shows up as a regular mailbox in your email client, but when you add an email to that folder, SaneBox takes note and nukes any future email from that address. It’s a kind of email blacklist, and it’s 100% effective in my experience.

I get almost no spam these days, so unwanted newsletters are the biggest annoyance in my inbox. Or rather, in my Sane Later mailbox. Having a way to quickly unsubscribe is golden. Hopefully it’ll come to the Mac in a future version of macOS.

How do you manage your unwanted email? Tell us your best practices in the comments below!

T&T: Tips for keeping strangers off your Wi-Fi network

 

Give digital trespassers the boot.

By David Nield of Popular Science

You don’t want neighbors or passers-by stealing your Wi-Fi any more than you want them stealing your water, electricity, or carefully curated collection of Blu-ray movies. In fact it’s more serious than that—if someone can hook on to the same network as you, it becomes easier for them to snoop on your browsing and your locally stored files.

So how do you go about locking things down? Thankfully, keeping unwelcome visitors away from your Wi-Fi isn’t difficult and doesn’t need an IT qualification. Here’s what you need to do.

Keep changing your password

By far the easiest way to boot freeloaders off your wireless network is to change the Wi-Fi password. You need to do this through your router’s settings—either dig out the manual or run a quick web search to find the instructions for your particular make and model.

Change the password to something very hard to forget (for you) and impossible to guess (for everyone else) and you’ve got a clean slate as far as access to your wireless network goes. You do have the inconvenience of then reconnecting all of your devices and computers, but it’s a small price to pay for a clean Wi-Fi slate. Pick something that’s important to you, like a date or a name, but that no one else would think of, so it’s both simple for you to enter and secured against unwanted visitors.

 

The router’s initial password is often printed on a sticker that’s attached to the device itself, so changing it will prevent guests like party goers from spying on the security code. If the password’s only in your head or somewhere secure then no one else can connect up until you tell them what it is.

Actually, that’s not quite true—some routers feature one-touch WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) connectivity, so connecting to Wi-Fi can be done with a push of a button on the router itself. If you’re worried about someone doing this to get on the web, you can usually disable it through the router settings.

Check your router settings

While we’ve got your router configuration page open, a few other settings are worth looking at. First, change the default password used to access the router settings page to something else—this stops anyone who might gain access to your network from changing the Wi-Fi password themselves. As you’ll have realized when you accessed your router settings for the first time, you need a password to get into the menus, and a separate one to connect to Wi-Fi, so changing them both gives you maximum protection.

It’s also worth applying any pending firmware updates, which ensures your router is running the latest and most secure version of its own basic operating system. Again, with so many router makes and models on the market we can’t give you instructions for each one, but it should be simple to do—find the instruction booklet or a guide on the web for your device and it will only take a couple of minutes.

Elsewhere in your router’s settings you should find a screen listing the devices connected up to your Wi-Fi: Is there anything there you don’t recognize? You often have the option to disconnect a device, depending on the type of router you’ve got, though you might need to do a bit of detective work to identify the devices your router lists.

Finally, you should be able to find a setting that ‘hides’ your network (the technical term is the SSID or service set identifier) from view, so it won’t appear when your neighbors or visitors scan for Wi-Fi on their devices. If you need to connect a new device, you need to enter the SSID manually. It’s not a huge improvement in Wi-Fi security, but it’s a neat trick that can help you stay under the radar of hackers and Wi-Fi freeloaders.

Other security tips

If you want some extra help spotting who’s on your network who maybe shouldn’t be, beyond what your router offers, try Fing for Android or iOS, Acrylic Wi-Fi for Windows, or Who Is On My Wi-Fi for macOS. All those apps are free (for non-commercial use), and are easy to navigate around no matter what your level of networking know-how. Various other apps are available to do the same job too.

Installing a VPN on your computer doesn’t do anything extra in terms of stopping people from connecting to your Wi-Fi, but it does add an extra layer of encryption between you and the web—so that anyone who does manage to gain access to your network is going to have a much harder time trying to snoop on your activities (which websites you visit, the data you’re sending and so on). While a VPN might slightly slow down your connection speed, it keeps you a lot safer—just be sure to choose a reputable, paid-for service.

Finally, if your computer is close enough to the router to wire it up directly, and you’ve got strong cellular reception on your phone, you could turn off Wi-Fi on your router every once in a while, which can be done through the router settings on all modern boxes. No one’s going to be able to hook up to your Wi-Fi network if it’s switched off.

Do you have any tips for securing your home wifi network? Share them with us in the comments below!

Weekly Round Up – 7/28

 

Kenya – 1. America – 0
How Kenyans are using Tech to stop election fraud and violence.

Because Fake News, that’s why.
Why we need the liberal arts in Technology’s age of distraction

Does this new tech impact my discount as a Yelp Reviewer?
The Risk of Restaurant Tech

If Vegas offers odds on this, I’d make an effin’ fortune.
The tech skills gap will test Foxconn’s new Wisconsin factory

What?! No more Jitterbug?!
Best Buy bets on tech for monitoring elderly parents

Healthcare is the new digital frontier and Amazon already has a leg up on it’s competitors.
Amazon has a secret health care team called 1492 focused on medical records, virtual doc visits

We used to joke that The Orchard had us all fitted with implants called the iSliver.
Tech company workers agree to have microchips implanted in their hands

 

App of the Week: Nebo; the handwriting app is like paper, only better.

 

 

BY CHARLIE SORREL of Cult of Mac

Nebo is an alternative to Apple’s upcoming iOS 11 Notes app. Like the Apple app, Nebo lets you use the Apple Pencil to draw and write in notes. It also recognizes the words you write and lets you search on those terms. Unlike the native Notes app, however, Nebo also converts your longhand scrawls into actual, editable text, which can be copied and pasted anywhere.

In fact, I used Nebo to write this entire article. My handwriting isn’t as fast as my typing any more (my hand still hurts), but the app is fantastic.

Nebo is like a smart piece of paper

Nebo is absurdly easy to use. That comes, I think, because it works so well. At no point during writing this piece did I get frustrated, or find the app doing something I didn’t want it to do. Quite the opposite, in fact: Nebo works just like paper, only better.

As you write, Nebo converts your words to text, and shows them at the top of the paragraph. This gives you confidence that it’s doing a good job. The handwriting recognition is uncanny. After a while I stopped trying to be clear, and just wrote in messy “joined-up.” Nebo got almost everything. Even better, you can make corrections like you would with pen and paper by writing over the word you want to replace. Nebo recognizes this and corrects the word for you. It’s not perfect, although the level of imperfection depends on how bad your handwriting is.

To erase a word, just scribble over it. To add and remove spaces, or split and join paragraphs, just draw a vertical line up or down. Then, when you’re done, simply convert to text or export text via the standard share sheet.

More than words

In Nebo, you can also sketch, add images and diagrams, and even do math. This last feature is pretty neat — you write an equation, then Nebo converts it into fancy math symbols. Better still, it’ll work out the answers for you, which paper will never do.

You can also search your notes (the search terms will be highlighted) and write bulleted lists just by starting each new line with a dash.

Sketches and diagrams are done in boxes, but they remain in-line with the body text. This is already an improvement on iOS 10’s Notes app, which shifts you to a separate mode for drawings.

Apple Pencil required

To use Nebo, you need an Apple Pencil. (The app actually requires you to prove you own one on first launch.) But if you have one, and you like handwriting, you’ll love Nebo. It’s not quite the same as the iOS 11 Notes app — in some ways it’s actually more powerful than Apple’s app, which is currently available in beta only.
If you’re hankering for a handwriting recognition app now, Nebo might be perfect for you.

Nebo will cost you just $3.

Download Nebo for iPad.

Nebo is also available for Android and Windows 10.

Do you have a favorite handwriting App for your tablet? Tell us in the comments below!

How to: Scan Documents Using the Notes App in iOS 11

 

By Michael Potuck of 9to5 Mac

Apple has been improving its Notes app each year, and this time around one of the main updates is the ability to scan documents within the app in iOS 11. Follow along after the break for a look at how this useful feature works.

Apple has done a nice job implementing document scanning seamlessly into Notes, and from my testing so far, it works well and is quick and easy to use. I love having my scans synchronized across all of my Apple devices and it’s super fast to share scans with or without marking them up.

How to scan documents in the Notes app

1 Open a new or existing note
2 Tap the + icon and tap Scan Documents
3 Place your document in the camera’s view
4 Use the shutter button or one of the volume buttons to capture the scan
5 If needed, adjust the corners of the scan by dragging, then tap Keep Scan
6 Tap Save when finished scanning or continue on to add more pages

 

This feature works really nicely for any size document, but is especially handy for large documents that can be goofy to scan with a traditional scanner. It seems to be easiest to adjust the frame of the scan by tapping a bit away from the magnifying glass in each corner and then dragging.

You also get the option to use the camera flash and filters when scanning.

You can also edit your documents after you’ve scanned them. Tap on your scanned docs to bring up the editing toolbar to add more pages, change the filter, rotate, and crop.

Tapping the share button from within the scanned docs will allow you to markup, markup as PDF, print, copy, and share. Check out our how to guide for more help getting the most out of your Apple devices.

What’s your current favorite Scanning App? Tell us about it in the comments below!