I’ve been very surprised how many bookmarks some users of Yummy have. What I’d like to find out, with your help, is how many a “typical” user has.
Thank you.
Month: June 2009
In the past few weeks I have received a few emails and one review in the App Store saying some variation of “Yummy asks for my password every time I start it. How do I make it stop?”
In fact, Yummy, does save your password, but there are two cases where it will ask for the password anyway.
The first case is the most obvious: your Delicious.com password has changed. I’m guessing that this isn’t the case here, though.
The second case is where Yummy has not finished downloading all your bookmarks for the first time. The simple solution here is to let it download all your bookmarks before exiting. If you have a lot of bookmarks you might find that it’s quicker to use WiFi rather than the cell/mobile network. If you have thousands of bookmarks this may take a while, and the UI may become unresponsive for short periods of time. Once complete, if you look at the menu screen you should see the text “Last sync:” and then a time, which indicates the last activity on your Delicious.com account.
Note that this only refers to the first complete sync; after this Yummy should not ask for your password again. Incidentally, you can see how many bookmarks Yummy knows about in the About screen. And Delicious tells you on your home page:
If you’re sure that you’ve entered your password correctly and that Yummy has the full compliment of bookmarks and you’re still being asked for enter your password every time, please let me know.
Many readers will already know that the new version of the iPhone operating system, 3.0, is scheduled to hit the wires later today.
I’ve been using Yummy with the new iPhone OS for a while now. The last release of Yummy and Yummy Browser both included minor fixes to make them compatible with the new OS. I am not aware of any issues though, as ever, if you find anything please do let me know (you should find a support link to the right of this page and there are two buttons on the About screen). Neither version makes any special use of the new features of 3.0 but things like cut-and-paste work just fine.
In related news, I am still working on the next version of Yummy. It will be more 3.0-ish (in that it supports landscape mode) but will continue to work on handsets running iPhone OS 2.x. It is likely that subsequent versions will require OS 3.0 or higher.
Reviews are an important part of the iPhone App Store. Since there is no way to download trial versions of software (other than with ‘lite’ versions), reviews are the only way to see what other people think without Googling or asking knowledgeable friends.
What they are not, however, is a good way to complain about bugs or mis-features. This, for example, is a review for Yummy Browser found in the New Zealand store:
Don’t like having to add password everytime app is open. Frustrating. Otherwise app is good but password thing is a bit of a deal breaker
Let me be clear here: I have no problem with people giving an honest review. If the author didn’t like it, that’s fine.
No, the problem is twofold. First, developers have no official way of reading reviews in all the various App Stores without actually going and visiting them. With dozens of stores where applications are for sale, this quickly becomes a very painful process and therefore one I do infrequently. The practical result of this is that the above review was posted nearly a month ago and I only noticed it yesterday. I prefer to provide much better support than this.
Secondly, this is not how Yummy (or Yummy Browser) is supposed to behave. What should happen is that it should ask once for your password and then again only if the saved password is invalid (i.e., you changed it). You may also get the login screen if it didn’t finish synchronising.
So it could be a bug or a misunderstanding of how Yummy is supposed to work. But the review system in the App Store gives me no way to correspond with the reviewer or reply to him. I can’t ask exactly what the problem is and without that I can’t fix it or document it better.
So, I have two requests for users of both Yummy and Yummy Browser.
First, if you have a problem with (or suggestion for) it, please use either the “Web feedback” or “Mail feedback” buttons in the About screen. (In general, the former is best for feature requests, the latter for bug reports.) This will enable us to have a direct dialogue if necessary. By all means post a review, but please don’t only post a review.
Secondly, if you see the same behaviour as described above please let me know. This is something that I would like to get to the bottom of if it is a real problem.
And finally, at the risk of appearing as if I can’t count, if you like Yummy please add a review to the App Store!
As some of you already know, next week is Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, where Macintosh and iPhone developers gather to learn how to build better applications and all the exciting new technologies coming in new versions of their operating systems.
Unfortunately I don’t have either the time or money to attend but I did take a couple of pictures as I passed by this afternoon.
If you can spot the Yummy icon you can win a free copy!
Apple App Review have posted a pretty thorough run-through of Yummy on YouTube:
They cover pretty much all the important functionality. In fact about the only thing that they didn’t cover is the web preview, the tag view and the search functionality.
One thing that has bothered me about Yummy for a while is the problem of very long article titles. Here’s what anonymous said about it on my UserVoice page:
Bookmark or article titles on the web can be very long… the current default size for bookmarks is too big, making it quite hard to read the full bookmark titles. I would suggest offering a font choice (see Wikiamo for a great implementation), or perhaps allowing bookmark titles to break on to a new line, in a smaller default font, and then create a gap between each bookmark block.
For those that are not familiar with it, Wikiamo has a slider control that allows you to vary the size of the text.
Some alternatives to Yummy “solve” the problem by allowing you to view your bookmarks in landscape mode. I put solve in quotes as it doesn’t really solve the problem. Sure, it allows longer titles but it doesn’t guarantee that you can see every long headline, a flaw it has in common with reducing the font size.
Instead of these partial solutions, Yummy automatically scrolls long titles (or tags if you have them). Clearly the screen would instantly become a jumble of moving text if done incorrectly. I spent a lot of time trying to get the balance right and I think it works pretty well. It defaults to waiting a couple of second and then starting scrolling. You can change the delay in the Settings application. Here’s a short video showing how it looks.