Yummy 2.6.6

by • on April 7, 2012 • in news

A week later than I had originally planned, but here is another app update that has been submitted to Apple for approval. In some ways it’s a bigger update than the 0.0.1 increment might lead you to believe. But let’s start with the user-visible changes:

  • Visual updates, including Retina graphics for the new iPad
  • Much faster “Get title” feature

The second item has pretty much the same caveats I mentioned in www.cut 3.1: it’s designed to be quicker than the functionality it replaces, though it is sometimes less accurate. That is, websites that do “clever” things with the title, such as using frames (1996 called…) or updating with Java Script after the initial load, may well fail. But overall I think the speed-gain is a net win.

The greater performance made one extra feature possible. Last month I mentioned a flaw in Delicious’ new “get links from Twitter” functionality. Namely, that those bookmarks when pulled into Yummy lack the website title. (As a quick aside, it’s only because of what’s arguably a bug in Yummy that these bookmarks could be saved at all. Normally the title is a mandatory field.)

In Yummy 2.6.6, if, when downloading a bookmark, it finds that the title is missing it uses the new “Get title” feature to populate the field as you’d expect.

Three small points: if the bookmark has already been downloaded then Yummy will not go back and get the title. You can do this manually (press ‘Edit’, then ‘Get title’ and finally ‘Done’) or, if you have a lot of them, as I did, then you can simply log out and log back in again.

Secondly, the title does not come from Delicious, so I can’t guarantee that it will be the same. It should be most of the time, but if they differ it’s (probably) not a bug.

Thirdly, Yummy gets the titles after finishing its normal sync process. There is (currently) no status update posted on the main screen but you can see that’s it’s working because the “network activity” spinner in the status bar will be going.

If you don’t like this functionality (or it causes problems for some reason) I added a setting to disable it.

Keep an eye on Twitter (or the available updates in the App Store) for when it makes it out of Cupertino.

 

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www.cut 3.1

by • on April 1, 2012 • in news

I have just submitted www.cut 3.1 to Apple for approval, so hopefully it should be available for download some time in the next week.

It’s mainly bug fixes and cosmetic updates, including new Retina graphics for the new iPad, but there’s one new feature that I hope you’ll like.

Previously when you Tweeted a link or sent it to Facebook, it sent just the link with no information about it. In this new version, you should get the title too.

A couple of minor caveats:

  • Firstly, if the website is slow (or you’re very quick), you might press the “Twitter” or “Facebook” button faster than www.cut can figure out the title. This is deliberate. If you really do want the title, press cancel and try again. Unless…
  • Unless the website is a bit odd and www.cut can’t figure out the title. This might be because there are a lot of redirects, because the title is generated using JavaScript or some other mysterious reason. I’ll be trying to improve the algorithm as time goes on, but the objective is for it to be quick rather than 100% accurate

Still, I hope you find it useful.

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Privacy Pledge

by • on March 20, 2012 • in news, trivia

I signed the App Maker’s Privacy Pledge. It was easy to do since the first paragraph pretty accurately summarises my thoughts:

We… value a long term relationship with customers who trust us over selling those same customers out to other companies for short term gains.

It says that I pledge:

  • To be clear about what information our apps need to provide the features we offer.
  • To only collect information required to implement our apps’ features.
  • To allow our customers to opt in to only those features they are comfortable with; never to enable features that enable information-sharing without explicit agreement.
  • To allow our customers to review the information we have collected about them, and to delete information about a customer when that person requests it.
  • To present in clear language our relationships with other businesses, and the information we share as part of that relationship.

This philosophy filters through all Wandle apps. They do exactly what they say they do. They don’t collect personal details (so there’s no need to out-out), they don’t “phone home,” I don’t have any information about you. They don’t even collect anonymous statistics.

I especially like the last paragraph of the pledge:

In short, our apps – not our customers – are our products.

I think this is important. These days Google and Facebook make huge amounts of money by selling your attention to advertisers. That’s not the kind of business I want to be in. I think it’s much fairer to sell something of value. This is why last year I transitioned www.cut from being ad-supported to being 99c and that’s partly why the next major version of Yummy won’t have a free version.
There are  lot of companies out there trying to dupe their customers, but  I have no intention of being one of them. I’d rather have your trust than make a quick buck at your expense.
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Stacks

by • on March 9, 2012 • in support

I’ve had a few queries about this, both by email and UserVoice. I’ve responded on Twitter already but I just realised that I’ve not said anything here.

For those that are not familiar with them, recently Delicious added a new feature where you can bundle a bunch of links together in a Stack. This, I suppose, has a similar use-case to Tag Bundles but rather than grouping bookmarks automatically using tags, you manually add them to a Stack.

It seems that they are a popular new feature.

Unfortunately, and the reason that they’re not in Yummy, is that they have not yet provided developer support for Stacks. There is no way that Yummy, or indeed any third party client, can request the information from Delicious.

If you would like to see Stacks in Yummy, I would suggest that you ask Delicious to allow API access to Stacks. While I can’t say how long it would take to implement and release, I can say that it’s a feature that I would like to see in Yummy myself.

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Tweet a Link, Save a Link

by • on March 5, 2012 • in support

You may have seen the new feature by Delicious that allows you to save all the links that you tweet. Neat idea, right?

Slightly flawed implementation, unfortunately. For the moment, if you’re a heavy Yummy user, you may be as well not enabling this option.

The problem is that while all the links get saved they don’t include their title; the tweet is included in the notes field, but the title is empty. (When pinboard.in do the same thing, they put the website name as the title and the tweet as the notes.) To be more specific, you can see the title on the website but they are not present in the API, which is how Yummy accesses all your bookmarks.

This does not cause any technical problems. Your bookmarks sync correctly. It just makes it a bit tricky to find them again since the don’t have a title.

I am looking a ways to improve the situation in Yummy — it already includes the ability to fetch a bookmarks title but it only works one link at a time — but hopefully the new team at Delicious might fix things first. Watch this space.

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Now more Wandle-y

by • on February 25, 2012 • in news

You’ll notice a change wherever your usual destination is.

I have merged the previously separate Wandle Software and the Yummyapp websites. It’s basically the old Yummy website with extra content, covering details about www.cut and Wandle, the company.

You should find the same (or more) content but if you find anything missing, please let me know. I’ll do what I can to put it back again.

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Yummy 2.6.5

by • on December 12, 2011 • in news, support

I submitted a new version of Yummy to Apple late last week. Hopefully it will be approved by Apple soon. There are just two bug fixes in this release, but they seemed important enough to warrant an update.

  • Allows use of non-English keyboards (iOS5)
  • Fix for occasional problem when adding/editing bookmarks using Pinboard.in

Neither of these bugs affect Yummy Browser so that will remain on version 2.6.4.

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Google+

by • on December 5, 2011 • in news, trivia

If you’re not overwhelmed by tracking Yummy on Facebook and Twitter you can now follow all the Wandle Software news on Google+ as well.

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Yummy 2.6.4

by • on December 1, 2011 • in news, support

A couple of days ago I submitted a minor update to Yummy (and Yummy Browser) to Apple and they are both now live in the App Store. It’s still “Waiting for review” so I don’t know when it will be available, but hopefully it will be soon.

There are a few, minor internal changes but the following were either reported directly by users, ones I’ve seen crash reports for or things you might notice:

  • Fix crash on launch screen
  • Fix crash in Settings screen (iOS5)
  • Fix so that main menu works even when you press detail button
  • Change so that it’s possible to edit the URL in a bookmark
  • Change so that adding a pre-existing URL displays the bookmark
  • Changes to clipboard URL detection
  • Improvements to copy from clipboard at startup
  • Spot duplicate bookmarks before saving (as well as when using URL scheme)
  • Convert spaces to commas when saving tags to Delicious

The last one is pretty important if you use Delicious. It means that you should continue to use spaces to delimit your tags, even though the website now uses commas. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, there are problems with using spaces in your tags. I’d recommend not using spaces until Delicious have fixed their API.

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Tags, Spaces and Commas

by • on November 24, 2011 • in support

In the olden days, say a month or so ago, things were much simpler. In both Delicious and Pinboard.in, you listed your tags separated by spaces. This worked both on the websites and in all third party apps.

But in late October that changed. (I don’t know the exact date, since I can’t find a blog announcing it.) Delicious decided to switch over to using commas to separate tags. The problem with using spaces to separate tags, they say, is that the tags themselves, for obvious reasons, cannot contain spaces.

However, the problem with using commas is that Delicious have not completely updated their systems to make it work with third party clients.

Let me explain.

When Yummy, or indeed any third party client, sends a list of tags to Delicious, it is expected to send a comma separated list.

When Yummy receives bookmarks from Delicious, they arrive delimited by spaces.

For example, if you enter “tag1,tag 2,tag3″ on the Delicious web site, it will send that back to Yummy as “tag1 tag 2 tag3″ which it has no way of interpreting as anything other than four distinct tags.

So, what should you do?

With the current version of Yummy (2.6.3), you should add and edit tags delimited with commas. I would recommend not using spaces.

I will be submitting a new version (2.6.4) in the next few days. In this, you should enter tags separated by spaces. Yummy will convert them to commas behind the scenes. But, even then, you should probably not use spaces in your tags until Delicious fix things at their end.

I would concede that this is not great. This is not the first time that Delicious has broken their API and I’m getting pretty sick of it to be honest! If you’d like to help, you can add your voice to the bug report that I raised on the Delicious support site.

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