Year: 2009

By now many of you (assuming you own Yummy!) will have seen the above warning message. Why are you getting it and what does it really mean? That’s what this post hopes to answer.

The first thing to note is that the error message is being completely honest. The iPhone has told Yummy that it is running out of memory and that if nothing changes it will be shutdown without warning.

Does that not mean that Yummy is being incredibly wasteful? How could it possibly be using 8Gb of memory just to display a webpage? The answer to that is, it’s not that memory that is being depleted. In order to run programs the iPhone has around 128Mb of memory, less than 30Mb of which is available to third-party applications like Yummy. The number on the box, the 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb sizes, are a different “pot” that cannot be used for the same purpose.

So, the first thing that Yummy does when it starts running out of memory is to “forget” about as much stuff as possible that it doesn’t currently need. This means that the number of bookmarks in your Delicious account has little bearing on how much memory is used.

Jettisoning this temporary data is typically enough to allow the webpage to load. However if you’re loading a particularly large or complicated page it might not be and, unfortunately, Yummy often does not get a second warning before being forced out.

This is one of those rare cases where I’ve had to let some of the underlying technical details show through. It’s not ideal but I thought it better that you know what’s going on rather than just allow it to exit without warning.

The functionality of Yummy that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks has pretty much been what you get “out of the box.” There is, however, an increasingly large number of switches and options in the Settings application that you can set to customise Yummy to work just the way you like.

You Delicious.com credentials are typically set when you launch Yummy for the first time. If you want to change to a different user or you’ve changed your password, this is where you change it.

Share new posts. Are new bookmarks public or private by default?

Refresh on startup. By default Yummy with try to synchronise your bookmarks as soon as you start. If you don’t change your bookmarks very often or have a lot of bookmarks and it takes a while to refresh, you may prefer to sync manually.

Remember last screen. If this option is set to ON Yummy will start in the same mode you were using last time you had it open. (Yes, in version 2.0 there’s a typo. This will be fixed in the next version.)

Shake to refresh. A fun option suggested by a user. Rather than having to press the Refresh button in the menu screen, you can simply shake your iPhone or iPod touch to initiate a full sync.

Twitter Client. Many Yummy users also regularly use Twitter. This option allows you to send bookmarks to your favourite Twitter client,

Shorten URL. If enabled, Yummy will shorten the URL using is.gd before sending to Twitter. This option is not used when sending links to Safari or Mail.

A popular request from users of version 1.0 if Yummy was a built-in web page viewer. I was more than happy to oblige.

The “action” menu at the bottom right is exactly the same as that found in the post view screen, with the same functionality and operation.

While mainly designed to view your bookmarks, it’s not unusual to venture off the well trodden path occasionally. If you find a page you want to bookmark as well, you can add it to Delicious using the “add” button which you’ll find to the left of the action button.

All the information that delicious.com holds about your bookmarks are available in Yummy, whether you are on- or off-line.

Of course there’s no point in just looking at your bookmarks! You want to do something with them. The first option is hinted at by the arrow to the right of the URL. This opens the web preview. I’ll be talking about that a little more tomorrow.

There are further options that you can find by pressing the “Action” button in the bottom right of the screen:

The two options that are always available are open the link in Safari and send it to Mail. You can also configure Yummy to send the bookmark (optionally shortened using is.gd) to Twitter. More about that in a couple of days.

You can also edit any bookmark by pressing the “Edit” button in the top right of the screen. Unlike in Yummy version one, all editing, with the exception of the date field, is performed directly in this screen without flipping to an edit only screen.

An “add bookmark” screen looks very similar (see above) but the operation is exactly the same. You can add new bookmarks by pressing the “add” button that you’ll find in most Yummy screens. As with version one, the bookmarklet is also available when you’re in Safari. The instructions for adding it are exactly the same as before.