Wandle SoftwareNot a new feature, but I thought it was worth mentioning again:
Yummy is still the only delicious.com client on the iPhone to support accounts that require your Yahoo! ID to log in.
If you want more information look here for the FAQ or check out this video that shows it in action.
Also, just to be clear, Yummy Browser also supports Yahoo! ID logins.
Yummy has been able to share your bookmarks in various ways since version 1.0. Yummy 2.4 adds a new way: share with your Facebook contacts.
As the text suggests, just enter your Facebook login credentials. Yummy will remember them for future reference.
An entirely new feature that you should easily be able to find in the main menu is the ability to view your Tag Bundles.
A Tag Bundle is a collection of tags, and drilling down shows a list of all the bookmarks that have any of the tags in it. If you have a lot of tags in one bundle or many tags in total it may take a second or two to produce the list but it will work eventually.
Like the Web Preview screen that I talked about yesterday, the Tag Editing screen is one that has existed for a while but sees a significant update in version 2.4.
Rather than just allowing you to select from your own tags, Yummy now goes back to Delicious.com and asks for recommended and popular tags for the link in question.
As you an see in the screen shot, it also shows your network, allowing you to share your bookmarks with other Delicious users.
Yummy has had a built-in web preview feature since version 2.0, but version 2.4 brings a number of nice improvements.
Most obviously is the new array of buttons at the bottom of the screen. I’m sure you can guess the back, forward and stop/reload buttons.
The buttons on the right of the screen can also be accessed in the bookmark view and they are, left to right:
More hidden, but possibly even more useful, is the support for Mobilizers.
A mobilizer is a service that transforms other websites, making them easier to view on the small screen found on handsets like the iPhone. If you go into the Settings you switch between “None” (the default), Instapaper and Google. The screenshot above has been converted by Google’s service.
I can tell what you’re thinking. Yes, Yummy has been able to send links to Twitter for over a year. Since version 2.0 the “Send to Twitter” button has closed down Yummy and opened one of a long list of Twitter clients.
While that option is still present, Yummy 2.4 includes a much better option: a built-in Twitter client. If you’re just sharing a link it means that you don’t have to exit Yummy which makes the whole process that little bit quicker and more convenient.
So how do you get it?
Easy.
First go to the Settings screen, either the one from the main menu or the one in the Settings app:
Change the Twitter Client option to “Built-in.” It’s the first option after “None.”
Next go to a link that you want to send to Twitter and press the “Link” icon in the toolbar. Press the “Send to Twitter” button.
Now comes the slightly annoying bit.
Press the “Login” button. Yummy will now (after a prompt) quit and take you over to Safari. Here you should log into Twitter as instructed and copy the PIN code to the clipboard.
(The irony of having a system to avoid having to exit an application requiring the user to exit when setting it up is not lost on me. I’m hoping to improve this in a subsequent version.)
On relaunching Yummy you should see the following screen:
Do as instructed and you’re ready to go. Yummy will have remembered your link (so you can publish straight away). You only need to go through this Yummy-Safari-Yummy trip once.
Publish link to Facebook:
Publish link to Twitter without using an external program:
After a hard couple of days it was nice to stumble across this discussion of synchronising bookmarks between computers, which includes a discussion of Yummy:
“Instead, I chose Yummy. There are free and pro versions of Yummy, but even the free version (called Yummy Browser) has more features and a better user interface than most paid alternatives. I was so impressed by the free version that I purchased the $1.99 pro version, which costs less (in some cases, much less) than most of its competitors. Both versions allow you to access your bookmarks and open them in Mobile Safari. The pro version adds a built-in browser, editing features, and support for InstaPaper and Read It Later, and comes with a handy Mobile Safari bookmarklet.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself!
Since there has been little visible activity here for the last month or two, I thought it might be a good time to let you know what’s happening with Yummy and where things are heading.
In short the next version is nearing completion and I hope to send it to Apple in the next couple of weeks. I’m not going to talk about features in this post but one thing that I would like to mention is that version 2.4 will be the first release to require iPhone OS 3.x. Until now Yummy has run on all version of iPhone OS that have the App Store (i.e., 2.0 and above), but the new OS has been out long enough and there are so few users of older versions that I think it’s time to make the jump.
Release 2.4 has a bit of a checkered history. I originally hoped to make it available before the end of last year but then Yahoo! threw a spanner in the works and I had to spend a lot of time writing code to support the new Yahoo! ID log in scheme. I figured that not doing this would put me at a big disadvantage when my competitors updated but so far Yummy remains the only Delicious client on the iPhone that supports the new log in scheme.
I also spent an unusually large amount of time working on features that never made it into the shipping version. This always happens to some degree, but one “biggie” ended up being discarded and another was repurposed. This meant that a couple of other features ended up being pushed out of this release altogether.
However, all the work on the Yahoo! ID scheme meant that another feature, one planned for version 3 or later, became much easier and was therefore brought forward to this release.
I know I’m teasing a bit here. Details will follow shortly.
At the same time I am also progressing an update to www.cut, my quick URL shortening app. This was originally to be a minor update due before Yummy 2.4 but is likely to make it out shortly afterwards, hopefully before the end of March.
Next, like many other iPhone developers I have been looking at the recently announced iPad and wondering how well my applications would work on it. To be clear, Yummy should work just fine as it is but I’m curious if there are ways that I can make better use of the increased screen real-estate.
In short I think there is but the current UI will need to be rewritten. If I go down that route I want it to be a proper iPad application and not just a quick hack.
To that end, I have just started work on Yummy 3.0. This is a complete, ground-up re-write with some new ideas and a new approach to managing your delicious.com bookmarks. At this stage it’s more sketching thing out on paper and prototyping small pieces of code than hard-core development but some ideas are staring to take shape.
It’s at such an early stage that I’m not going to make any estimates as to when you might expect to see it. It is likely be a while, so there will be more point releases in the 2.x line.
So, in summary, there will be a few updates to look out for in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.