I have just been watching the video announcement of the new iPhone operating system and considering how it will impact Yummy.
What follows are my first impressions of the announcements. I am deliberately writing this before I’ve seen the SDK so I can be sure that I am not violating the NDA, but that does mean that some of the things I speculate may not even be possible. That is, these are thoughts and not commitments. These are also opinions as a developer rather than a user of an iPhone. As a user there are undoubtedly some useful new features but it seems to me that the SDK is where the real news is.
So, in no particular order:
Mail sheet. This is great. The ability to send a link by email without leaving Yummy will be a great improvement. I would also like the ability for third party applications to have similar functionality. How cool would it be for, say, TwitterFon to have an “Add to Delicious” button that showed a Yummy screen to complete the task. Or for Yummy to be able to send links to Twitter using a Twittelator screen?
Cut and paste. I am not as convinced as some people that this is an absolutely critical enhancement, but it’s still going to be nice to have. One particular scenario that I would use is copying some text on a web page, post the link using Yummy and add some notes that includes the quote. You can’t really do that right now without a notepad and paper!
Core data. This is a pretty technical one but it jumped off the page when I saw it on the slides, though it wasn’t mentioned much more than that. Core Data is an Apple-endorsed way of saving data to a database with fairly simple and well-tested code. My hand-crafted code won’t go away any time soon (since I’ll still need to support OS 2.x for a while yet) but this is going to make writing future applications much easier.
Spotlight search. Mac OS 10.4 was worth the upgrade for Spotlight alone, even in the fairly unfinished state it was in then. An iPhone stores much less data and the data that is there is fairly well compartmentalised so I’m not convinced that it’s going to be quite so useful here. Having said that, I would like to see Spotlight work with the title and notes fields held in Yummy’s cache of your Delicious.com bookmarks.
As far as I can tell, most of the other publicly announced developer-centric features probably don’t impact Yummy. As ever, there is almost certainly some other things that I missed or Apple didn’t tell us about. When I delve into the SDK I’ll have a much better idea. As ever, I’m open to suggestions if you have any ideas.
Anyway, must dash. I have some new code to write…
