Using the shelf
Catching a drag, carrying the stack out, and what stays on the shelf when you walk away.
The shelf has no window to open and no icon to click. It appears when you're already dragging something and disappears when you're not.
Catching a drag
Start dragging anything, then flick up toward the notch. The shelf drops down and catches whatever you let go of over it.
You can do that as many times as you like, from as many places as you like (Finder, Safari, Photos, Mail, a Save dialog), and it all piles onto the same shelf. Files, folders, images dragged out of a web page, links and plain text all land the same way.
Carrying it out
Drag a tile off the shelf and drop it where it belongs. Grab the stack and you take everything at once.
Whatever the destination accepts leaves the shelf; a refused drop springs back rather than vanishing. Because perch hands out copies of its own staged copy, dropping the same pile into three places is three drags, not three trips back to where the files came from.
A tile appears only once its copy has finished
Nothing on the shelf is ever half-written, which is also why a big folder takes a moment to show up, and why quitting mid-copy doesn't lose it.
What stays, and for how long
Nothing leaves the shelf on its own. Clear asks first, and the expiry timer is off unless you turn it on in Settings, so a pile you left there yesterday is still a pile today.
Your originals are untouched throughout: perch stages a copy inside its own sandbox container and never moves, renames, edits or deletes the thing you dragged in.
Settings worth knowing
| Expiry | Off by default. Turn it on to have the shelf empty itself after a set time |
| Release check | An hourly look at perch's own release tag, and the only thing it sends anywhere. Turn it off and perch never opens a connection |
| iPhone | perch listens on your own network for an iPhone you paired yourself, encrypted end to end. Off if you don't want it |
| Appearance | Follows your Mac's Light/Dark, or a fixed polarity. On a haus machine, haus.perch.followSystemAppearance is the same switch |