Yoink is a fantastic tool that sits on your Mac, only visible when you need it. As a designer and developer, Yoink is indispensable in my workflow. Mac’s new full screen apps which were introduced a few versions back in OSX are fantastic. The issue with this is that dragging things between windows became much more difficult. Yoink solves that.
With Yoink, grab a stock image or icon you like and drag it directly into the semi-transparent panel which appears on the left side of the screen. Then 3-finger swipe over to Photoshop and drag it out of Yoink, into the design. It’s works great for XCode too as an easy way to add assets to your app while running XCode fullscreen. Yoink’s only there when you start dragging something and stays until you’re done using it. It works for moving files between folders in Finder, dragging images into Photoshop, and even a quick way to Show in Finder.
Pro Workflows: CMD+Space to open Spotlight. Search for the file you’re looking for. Drag it into Yoink and right click to show in Finder. It’s massively faster than using the “Show all in Finder” option inside of Spotlight for a specific file. You can also use this to grab a bunch of related files scattered around your drive and consolidate them into one spot. CMD+Space for each file and drag each into Yoink. Open finder and then you can drag each item from Yoink into a new location. The reverse of this is possible as well. Shift-Click or CMD+Click a group of files or folders and drag them into Yoink. If you need to separate these into their own folders for organization, all you need to do it click the “Split” icon on Yoink when you hover over the group. This splits the group into individual files allowing you to easily parse them out and move them into unique locations on your Mac.
Next time, you’ll hear about FilePane which when combined with Yoink offers an even more powerful workflow. Feel free to tweet at me with what you think of Yoink or any apps you think should be covered in this series.
