I’m particular about where links open. I want to open Instagram links in its app. I’d rather watch YouTube videos in ProTube, while it still works (RIP). I never want links to tweets to open in the official Twitter app. The point is, I want to follow links the way I prefer, not according to someone else’s defaults.

Fortunately, if you’re picky about this sort of thing too, there’s an app made just for you: Opener by Tim Johnsen. The strength of Opener is its action extension, which I keep in easy reach near the front of the system share sheet on my iOS devices. With the extension, you can send a link to any compatible app you have installed. With support for over 200 apps, it’s a rare occasion that I run into a URL that Opener can’t send to where I want it to open.

Opener has introduced new drag and drop functionality along with an iOS 11-style redesign. The new functionality makes Opener’s main app as easy to use as its extension and is particularly handy when researching. With Opener in Split View with Safari, I can manage where links open on the fly as I find materials I want to dig into in a certain app. Dragging in a link displays all the available apps on your iOS device in which you can open the link along with other supported apps with a link to them in the App Store. You can also drag links out of Opener into any compatible app.

Opener has adopted the design cues of system apps like Music, Apple News, and Messages with a big bold title and buttons that link to apps on the App Store that mirror the style used in that app. One additional new feature that I appreciate is keyboard shortcuts for external keyboards. There are shortcuts for Settings, Browser Settings, and numbered shortcuts for each app that can open the URL you feed to Opener.

Drag and drop is about reducing friction. Opener stands in between links and their final destination directing traffic by giving you options that the system won’t. That’s valuable if you care about where links open, but it’s also a step that needs to be as low friction as possible to make it worth the effort to use, which is why I’m glad to see that drag and drop has been adopted by Opener.

Opener is available in the App Store.

With the move to iOS 11, we’ve seen flashy releases centered around augmented reality, drag and drop, and depth mapping, showcasing what the headlining features of the new OS look like in practice. But an under-the-radar feature, QR code support in the Camera app, is shaping up to have a promising future, and Visual Codes shows us why.

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It’s been a while since we last looked at GIFwrapped, a must-have utility for anyone who enjoys animated GIFs. The app, by Jellybean Soup aka Daniel Farrelly, is an all-in-one solution for collecting, organizing, and sharing GIFs on iOS. With the addition of drag and drop support, wrangling your GIF collection has never been easier.

GIFs are notoriously hard to save from Twitter clients. Farrelly solved that problem since we last reviewed GIFwrapped with a share extension. When you see someone post a funny GIF that you want to add to your collection, tap the share button in your favorite Twitter client and pick the GIFwrapped extension from the system share sheet. It isn’t foolproof, but more often than not, GIFwrapped will spin for a moment and then acknowledge that the GIF has been saved to your library making collection a breeze.

Drag and drop support for devices running iOS 11 adds a similar level of convenience and flexibility to organizing and sharing GIFs with GIFwrapped. As with other apps that implement drag and drop, the feature shines brightest on an iPad. Now, you can drag a GIF anywhere that accepts images whether that’s Messages, a Twitter client, Slack, or even Apple’s Mail app. It’s a small change but easier and more natural feeling than sending a GIF through the share sheet or copying it in GIFwrapped and then pasting in the destination app.

Importing several GIFs from Photos into my GIFwrapped library.

GIFwrapped’s drag and drop functionality is not limited to the iPad though. Apple only allows drag and drop on the iPhone within a single app. However, if you have GIFs stored in your iPhone’s photo library, you can access them in GIFwrapped’s Photos tab and use drag and drop to pick up and drag multiple GIFs into GIFwrapped’s Library tab importing the whole stack at one time. The one thing I’d like to see added to GIFwrapped is the ability to manually organize my GIF by dragging them into an order of my choosing. Currently, you can sort your library by file name or date modified only.

GIFwrapped demonstrates just how powerful drag and drop is. Copying and pasting GIFs was not an enormous burden, but the iPad is designed for interaction with the content on the screen and the multiple steps needed to send a GIF where you wanted it before iOS 11 felt clunky. Now, I can pick my Dancing Eddy GIF right up off the screen of my iPad and drop it into Tweetbot for the 100th time with newfound ease.

GIFwrapped is available on the App Store.

Terminology by Agile Tortoise is my go-to dictionary and thesaurus app on iOS. Early this year, the app got a major update that transformed it into a full-featured language research tool, complete with customizable actions for searching Wikipedia, online dictionaries, and other resources. That update also added a powerful share extension that makes it easy to look up words you find on the web or in any other app.

You can mark words as favorites in Terminology so they are easy to return to but until now, your choices for extracting information from Terminology has been limited. There is a dedicated button in the app’s toolbar for copying words you look up. You can also select, copy, and paste definitions into other apps, but Terminology didn’t include a way to export a term and its definition together.

Version 4.1 adds iOS 11’s drag and drop feature, which makes it simple to drag a word and its definition from Terminology to another app on an iPad. When you start the drag, a preview of the definition appears under your finger. One small thing I’d like to see added to the preview is the defined word since it too is pasted into the destination app when you drop the definition. You can also drag a word from another app into Terminology’s search box to look up its definition, but I prefer to use the app’s extension.

If you’re a student or English is your second language, Terminology’s drag and drop functionality makes it easy to create lists of words to study or flashcards for learning definitions. Those may seem like narrow use cases, but combined with Terminology’s extension, custom actions, and other features, the app has become a Swiss Army knife for anyone who works with words from a student developing a broader vocabulary to professional writers.

Terminology is available on the App Store.

Earlier this year, John called Annotable “my hands-down favorite app for image annotations.” An all-in-one tool for marking up your images, Annotable serves as an interim stop for importing images and then exporting annotated versions to another app. With an iOS 11 update, images can now be dragged into and out of Annotable, making the annotation process simpler than ever before.

Let’s say you’re browsing the web on your iPad and you find an image online that you want to share with a friend, but you need to point out a detail. In Safari, you press and hold on the picture to pick it up, open Annotable, and drop it into the app when the green plus sign appears in the bottom right corner. The image will open in Annotable’s editor where you can apply any of the tools the app offers. You can even drag and drop text from another app onto an image in Annotable as an annotation. When you’re finished, tap save, and the image will be added to your camera roll, or drag the image into another app.

When you want to export photos, you can grab multiple from Annotable’s photo viewer and drag them to your app of choice. Of course, you could also head over to Photos to accomplish this, but I’ve found it convenient just to stay in the same app when I’m finished annotating my images.

Overall, the implementation of drag and drop into Annotable saves multiple steps, creating a more seamless way to get images into and out of this MacStories favorite.

Annotable is available on the App Store.