Categories
news trivia

www.cut

This isn’t directly Yummy related but I thought you might be interested. I have just launched a new, free iPhone application, called www.cut. It uses a bunch of code that’s already in Yummy but also has a number of its own tricks. Find the description below and its web page is here.

This isn’t one of those immersive applications that takes hours to figure out and weeks to master. Instead it’s a small but useful utility that shortens URLs for you so that they can be emailed, Twittered or Facebooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks messing up the link.

www.cut — we like to pronounce it “dub cut” — keeps out of your way as much as possible. For example, if there’s a URL on the clipboard when it starts it assumes that’s the one you want to use and immediately asks your configured shortening service to begin its work. When complete it automatically sends it straight back to the clipboard, so you might not even have to press a single button!

Of course you can also type the URL manually. If you want to email a message you can do it without leaving www.cut.

www.cut currently supports six shortening services:

The ones that support it allow you to log in so that statistics about your links can be gathered.

Simple but effective. That’s www.cut.

Categories
giveaway news trivia

Half Price Promotion

Just a quick post to note that Yummy is still on its half price sale! On Tuesday the price goes back up to $1.99 (or its local equivalent).

Categories
news reviews

Shiny iPhone Review

It’s always nice to get a good review, even more so when it’s unsolicited and unexpected! Thanks to Justin at Shiny iPhone.

Categories
giveaway news trivia

Yummy 1.0 Anniversary

The founder of LinkedIn said “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” I’ve been involved with the launch of a number of products over the last fourteen years and I agree wholeheartedly. It was as true the first time I was involved in an internal business application back in the late nineties as it was one year ago today when I submitted Yummy to Apple for approval.

Back in August 2008 Apple were being a little quicker with their review process and it took only about a week before it went live and available for sale on the 2nd September.

I said that I was going to give away a number of copies to celebrate and, indeed, I have. This time, however, I am going to take a slightly different approach. You can now find Yummy available for half price and it will stay that way until the 2nd. Grab it while you can — this is only the second time that I’ve ever reduced the price so it could be a while before I do so again!

Categories
giveaway news trivia

Beta 2 Anniversary

In fact this post is slightly delayed. It was a year ago yesterday that the second beta of Yummy 1.0 went out to its intended audience. However yesterday was a Sunday and most people don’t read blogs, Twitter or FaceBook on a Sunday.

So as is now becoming traditional, I am giving away some copies of Yummy. This time there are three going on FaceBook, one on Twitter and the final one is: FW3XYP79LWFX. Please let me know if you manage to get a copy.

Categories
giveaway news trivia

Beta 1 Anniversary

A year ago today the first beta of Yummy hit the streets. Well, when I say “street” I mean a few selected iPhone users. With the vast quantity of tutorial material currently available on the internet it’s difficult to remember that at this point last year everything iPhone SDK related was still covered by the NDA. This meant that getting your software running on another iPhone was tricky. The process is called “ad hoc” distribution and is still a bit of a black art.

The difference between the first beta and version 1.0 is slight, so I won’t post any screen shots as I did for the first run anniversary.

As promised, I am giving away a few copies of Yummy to mark the occasion. This time there is only one promo code (redeemable only in the US App Store I’m afraid — you have Apple to thank for that restriction) here: L3X4W9T7KLY3. Check out the FaceBook page and Twitter for the others. Please let me know if you manage to pick up one!

Categories
news support

17+ Rating

One thing that you might notice about the new version of Yummy, along with the enhancements it will also come with something that is worse than the previous version. Yes, you read that right. Of course, this isn’t by my choosing. Any app with web preview is now required by Apple to have a 17+ rating.

So, this doesn’t mean that the error messages now have expletives or that it automatically redirects you to porn sites occasionally. It just means that if you click the right links in the web preview you can get to questionable content. Just as you can in MobileSafari.

Yummy Browser, incidentally, keeps its 4+ rating as it doesn’t have a built-in web browser and provides no way to add new, suspicious content.

Categories
news support trivia

Yummy 2.3 Fallout

I thought that is was worth mentioning a couple of small things about the recent 2.3 release of Yummy.

The eagle-eyed will notice that it has support for the tr.im URL shortening service. Since I submitted the binary to Apple it has been shut down and subsequently resurected. On hearing the announcement I quickly scrambled together a new release that removed tr.im support and added tinyurl.com as an option. Given their change of heart I’m glad I didn’t submit a new binary.

And then on Tuesday evening I found a bug: if you enable the Twitter client option but disable the “Shorten URL” feature you might find that it doesn’t work as expected. Tweetie, for example, opens but you don’t get a new tweet to edit.

This is because Yummy “encodes” the URL before sending it and some Twitter clients don’t know how to interpret it. The work-around is to enable one of the “Shorten URL” options. (If you’re using Tweetie you’ll want to use bit.ly as it tries to shorten any URL it comes across… and you don’t want a URL shortened with is.gd shortened again with bit.ly!)

Apologies that this slipped through my testing. I’ll submit a point release that fixes this shortly.

Categories
news support

Yummy 2.3 and Yummy Browser 2.3 Are Go!

I just got the email that iPhone developers love to see: “Your application is now Ready for Sale”

So it’s probably not there in iTunes as I type this but version 2.3 of Yummy should be available in the next few hours. As a recap, key features in this version are:

  • Add tags to a new bookmark by selecting from a list of existing tags
  • ReadItLater support. Now you can push your bookmarks to ReadItLater in exactly the same way that it currently works with Instapaper
  • Send bookmarks to Twitter using SimplyTweet
  • Shorten bookmarks using bit.ly, Tr.im or Cli.gs as well as is.gd
  • More precisely remember the screen that was visible when restarting
  • If you enter the URL, you can ask Yummy to go to the website and get the title. This is useful when you add a bookmark from Safari (by manually typing ‘yummy:’ in front of the URL) or from Twitterrific (where you can’t see the title)
  • Changes to the way the initial download of bookmarks is handled to help avoid the dreaded Error 999

If you’re keeping track, at the time of writing, these are numbers 1, 2 and 4 in the list of user feedback on UserVoice and SimplyTweet support came from a user my email.

Of course there are the usual bug fixes and refinements (you now get a “Progress” screen when posting to Instapaper rather than just locking up the UI).

At the same time, they also approved version 2.3 of Yummy Browser.

In this version you get the scrolling bookmark names that was originally introduced in Yummy 2.2. This version also includes adverts on the home screen. This is an experiment. If it works, you might see functionality working its way down from the full version of Yummy more quickly.

Categories
news trivia

Yummy 2.3 Preview

Here’s a video showing some of the new features coming in Yummy 2.3:

With luck it will be hitting the App Store shortly.