512 Pixels

Yoink for Mac improves your workflow by providing a “shelf" for your files and snippets.

When you drag a file in Finder, or app-content like an image from a website, Yoink appears at the edge of your screen, where it will hold any files you drag to it until you need them again.

It’s much easier to navigate to the destination of your files without having to keep your mouse button pressed the entire time.

With Yoink for iPad and iPhone, you can store anything you can drag, copy, share or download.

Deeply integrated into iPadOS and iOS, this beloved utility will keep your files and snippets and allows you to access them whenever they’re needed, via the app itself, its widget, its custom keyboard, Siri Shortcuts, and its Files.app integration.

Yoink syncs across your iOS devices, and by using Handoff, you can transfer files between your Macs, iPads and iPhones.

Users of the Mac app appear to be finding it very useful, as this 5-star review on the Mac App Store shows:

“Essential app, perfectly executed!”

Similarly, so do users of Yoink for iPad and iPhone:

“Completely brilliant and indispensable.” Yoink - drag it easy.

Om Malik:

Photography as we know it has been around for about 150 years, though its origins can be traced to earlier civilizations. But it has never been so visceral, and so much a part of our daily lives, as it is now. In short, the arc of photography’s history is that it has always been about getting more and more people to take photographs. Our desire to know more about ourselves means we must have more of them, more often, in more places, and of many more things. Whether it was new chemicals or new film or new sensors, technological advances in this area have — by and large — been about making it simpler for us to capture the moment. All of it has brought us to today, when we have quietly passed the cultural tipping point where taking a photo is as second nature as breathing. There’s no art to it. It is just something we are always doing.

In many ways, the iPhone reminds me of another groundbreaking camera: the Brownie. Launched at the turn of the last century, the original Brownie was the catalyst of change that helped us record our own history — exactly what those servicemen were doing more than a century later as I labored at my art.

This week on Mac Power Users:

As the iPhone and iPad have become more full-featured, the software that runs them has gotten more complex and powerful. This time, David and Stephen run though a whole bunch of their favorite ways to get more out of these devices.

On More Power Users, we got into the recent avalanche of Mac rumors.

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Ben Zotto:

Apple’s second computer — its first to have a case — launched in 1977, and that boxy beige Apple II was soon everywhere: in classrooms, living rooms and offices. At the vanguard of a generation of personal computers to come, it featured a particular and carefully-chosen beige. But what did that look like? Those first machines — the ones that have escaped landfills anyway — have shifted in color over 40 years. The documented public record is sketchy and confused. But I stumbled upon a way to investigate what Apple Beige was like.

I love this.

via kottke.org

This week on the show, we plan the WWDC Olympics, talk about what’s inside the AirPods Max and what the future of the Mac Pro may look like. Lastly, a report about folding iPhones is considered.

On Connected Pro, we reflect on the Inauguration, Ticci talks about TIDAL and I give an update on my foot.

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John Hendrickson, writing at The Atlantic:

Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss. He stutters— if slightly—on several sounds as we sit across from each other in his office. Before addressing the debate specifically, I mention what I’ve just heard. “I want to ask you, as, you know, a … stutterer to, uh, to a … stutterer. When you were … talking a couple minutes ago, it, it seemed to … my ear, my eye … did you have … trouble on s? Or on … m?”

Biden looks down. He pivots to the distant past, telling me that the letter s was hard when he was a kid. “But, you know, I haven’t stuttered in so long that it’s hhhhard for me to remember the specific—” He pauses. “What I do remember is the feeling.”

This is a powerful piece about something a lot of people deal with, including one of my children.

While I didn’t stutter, I spent over a decade in speech therapy as a child, and while my former struggles don’t often show their hand, I’m always thinking about what words or combinations of sounds may give me trouble. It’s exhausting, and I’m not speaking to the entire nation.

This post by David Sparks reminded me that I haven’t written about my backup strategy in some time.

The basic tools I use are unchanged from the last time I wrote about the topic. Time Machine is still my first line of defense, with Carbon Copy Cloner and Backblaze handling off-site backups.

However, the Drobo outlined in that 2018 post has been decommissioned, with its files now residing on my Mac Pro.

Thanks to the tower’s expandability, I’ve been able to add an internal clone, which updates nightly via Carbon Copy Cloner as well. That clone, the Time Machine drive and the Archives volume are all internal to the tower:

As far as my notebook, nothing has changed. I have a Time Machine drive that gets plugged in pretty often, and it’s also backed up to Backblaze and an off-site drive:

Every time I write an update about this, I share my thoughts on backups in general:

1. Be redundant. Having a single backup is good, but what happens if it gets killed by the same power outage that cooks your computer.
2. Be easy to manage. Time Machine is popular because it’s easy to setup and doesn’t need on-going care. Anything past the built-in backup will take more work, but it’s good to minimize it.
3. Be testable. Every once in a while, restore data from a backup to make sure everything’s going well. This doesn’t have to be some big, drawn out thing. For me, a small recovery can put my mind at ease every quarter or so.

Apple Support:

If you add a track from an audio CD into your iMovie HD project, you may be unable to eject that CD while iMovie HD is running.

This can happen if you’re using iMovie HD in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

To eject your CD, save your project and quit iMovie HD. You will then be able to eject your CD normally. After the CD is ejected, open iMovie again and resume work on your project.

If you have a number of CD tracks that you wish to add to an iMovie project, you can avoid this issue by first importing the tracks into iTunes. Once they are in your iTunes Library, they will be available for use in iMovie HD without needing to have the CD in your computer.

This time on Flashback, Quinn and I look back — in 3D! — at the Amazon Fire Phone. Between its operating system, unusual gesture system and a price that was way too high, it was dead on arrival. After that, we went shopping for each other, picking out some unusual products that bear Amazon’s name today.

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This week on Mac Power Users:

Writer and lawyer Jeff Richardson returns to the show to update Stephen and David on how he’s working at a 12.9-inch iPad Pro most of the time, even when needing to use Windows.

In More Power Users, we spoke about Project Titan, Apple’s heavily-rumored car project.

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