Year: 2010

Categories
news opinion

The rumours of Delicious.com’s demise…

As I type this the rumours of Delicious.com’s demise are just that: rumours. There have been no official pronouncements from Yahoo! so far and so, for the time being, it’s business as usual for Yummy and Yummy Browser. Delicious.com is still there. Your bookmarks are still there. You can still sync, add and edit them. I would argue that there’s no need to rashly jump ship.

Having said that, the rumours are credible. Yahoo! may yet sell or change their mind, so while rashly moving to another service might be overkill, now might be a good time to consider the alternatives. You’re welcome to mention your favourite in the comments but in my opinion.the closest equivalent to Delicious.com is probably pinboard.in. Yummy already has support for Pinboard, so you could transition over with very little change.

In summary, I’ve spent too much time and energy on Yummy to stop supporting and developing it on a rumour. I’ll say more when we know more.

Finally, if it’s true that the entire Delicious.com team were laid off, I would just like to extend my thanks to them all, especially Chris Draycott who has gone above and beyond in answering developer questions (both mine and others) in the forums.

Update (21:07): Yahoo! have just posted a blog saying that they are hoping to sell Delicious.

We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.

And:

As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. 

Categories
news support

Yummy 2.5.1

Last night Apple flipped the magic switch and the latest version of Yummy tumbled out and into the App Store. As you can tell with the .1 increment, it’s a minor release and includes the following changes:

  • Remove low memory warning in web preview 
  • Correctly remove deleted bookmarks when syncing with pinboard.in 
  • Display pinboard.in login buttons when enabling option in Settings.app 
  • Fix a couple of visual glitches in iPad version 
  • Show new bookmarks at the top of the “by date” view

The first one I mentioned in my last post. Basically, something annoying that happened previously (but with the best of intentions) has been removed. This increases the risk that Yummy will quit unexpectedly if it runs out of memory but these days that should be pretty infrequent.

The second should be self-explanatory. Pinboard users are pack-rats so I don’t that this affected too many users!

The third affects people who don’t have a delicious.com account and enable pinboard.in support in the Settings.app. There is, however, still one “gotcha.” After flipping the switch in Settings.app you’ll need to wait a few seconds — thirty to be safe — before Yummy will be able to pick up the change. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it seems that Apple do not save the new values for a while after changing them.

The glitches in the iPad version were just cosmetic (but looked a bit odd).

And, finally, the new bookmarks. When you added a new bookmark in Yummy, it initially and briefly has no date. In 2.5.0 it appeared in the “by date” list as older than your oldest bookmark and, therefore, practically inaccessible. This version now puts in a fake date and time (now) until Delicious.com (or pinboard.in) sends the correct value back a little later.

None of these problems affected Yummy Browser so that stays on 2.5.0 for the moment.

Categories
news reviews support

Reviews

I don’t often draw attention to specific reviews either in iTunes or elsewhere on the Internet but recently I found a couple that are interesting for different reasons that I thought might be interesting to post.

First, from Fumi2008 in the UK App Store:

“Been a long time user of this. Many other clients seemed to have fallen by the way side. Nice update. Most of all, thanks for keeping this application moving.”

It’s always nice to have happy users but that’s not what I want to draw to your attention here. It’s the fact that Yummy has been actively updated since it’s initial release in 2008, with an average of just over a hundred days between major releases. Some releases have been bigger than others but they’ve all, I think, had useful new features. I can’t promise to keep up that schedule for ever (indeed some of the remaining feature requests are pretty hard!) but I can say that Yummy is an application that I use myself every day, so I have every incentive to keep it both working and functional.

Second, from frinkle in the UK App Store:

“Yummy keeps interrupting my reading with dialogues about downloading. Then it either exits the page or reloads. Both annoying. Instapaper is much easier to use.”

The “dialogue about downloading” is, I assume, the Memory Warning that I wrote about in February 2009. I’ll be honest here. I have never like the memory warning; I didn’t really want to include it. As I said:

“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.“

However, February 2009 was when the iPhone 3G was the latest and greatest. Since then there have been two phones (and one iPad), both of which have more memory, and I’ve made optimisations and bug fixes in Yummy such that I am no longer convinced that Yummy quitting because of a lack of memory is going to happen regularly.

Therefore I have removed the warning from the version of Yummy (2.5.1) that I have just submitted to Apple for review. I’ll be monitoring the crash logs, though, just in case I’m wrong.

As to the second point about Instapaper, well, I don’t think that Yummy performs the same tasks as Instapaper. I think both apps follow the same design philosophy to a certain extent — wait for the next paragraph — but I certainly think that there’s room on your iPhone for both apps.

The final review I want to mention is by i-5-m in the UK App Store:

“It’s not beautiful, but it is functional.”

I want to mention this because… it’s true. Many people associate “polish” with flash animations and custom graphics. I don’t. These visuals do appear to be neat when you first launch it but they quickly get in the way. I want to put your bookmarks front and centre. I think by being functional and using Apple’s standard UI components (almost) exclusively I am advancing that aim.

Categories
howto news support

Improved Yahoo! ID login in Yummy 2.5

Remember the bad old days? When you used your Yahoo! ID to log into Yummy you had to leave the app, go into Safari, remember a number… Well, it wasn’t really that hard but there were more steps than I wanted. 
Yummy 2.5 changes that.

Now you never have to leave Yummy how ever you log into Delicious. This behaviour is actually contrary to the OAuth spec but the user experience is so much better and simpler I thought that it was worth breaking some rules.

Yahoo! do not serve a mobile-optimised web site so it requires a little scrolling around, but I still think that this is more convenient that switching over to Safari and back again. Of course, this works better on the iPad, which has a much bigger screen.

Categories
howto news

Why the “experimental” label for Pinboard.in support in Yummy 2.5?

You might have noticed that the new version of Yummy has support for the pinboard.in bookmarking website for introverts, but that I’ve flagged the feature as “experimental.” why would I add a new feature and yet suggest that you might not want to use it? That’s what I hope to explain in this post. 
Implementing support for pinboard.in was pretty easy. They use mostly the same API (way of talking to the server) as Delicious so it was just a matter of changing a few links and adding an option to the log in screen. 
The devil, however, is in the word “mostly.” The Delicious.com API is, bizarrely, not great for syncing your bookmarks, especially on devices with limited memory like an iPhone. The pinboard.in guys agree, which is why they didn’t implement the few concessions that Delicious made to allow syncing. 
What this means is that, technically, Yummy never syncs with pinboard.in, instead it downloads all your bookmarks every time. Also, it’s not possible to download bookmarks in “batches” which means that the more links you have the more likely it is to fail. (There is also a limit with Delicious but I’ve never heard of anyone reaching it.) Unfortunately it’s these “packrats,” with huge numbers of links, who are drawn to pinboard.in’s service. 
Having said all that, I still thought that it was a feature worth adding. There is some demand and I don’t know what the limit is; hopefully it’s high enough to be useful. 
So, what does “experimental” mean? In short it says that I have not fully decided what to do with it. If I get a disproportionate amount if support requests I may remove it. If successful I may create a separate app. 
But if you do use it, please let me know how you get on. 
Categories
howto support tutorial

Pinboard.in Support in Yummy 2.5

Yummy 2.5 adds support for the social bookmarking site for introverts, pinboard.in. It is, however, disabled by default, so today I want to talk about how to enable it.
The first step is — obviously — to enable it. You can open the Settings app or use the settings option from Yummy’s main screen. Either way you should see something like the screen below.

Flip the switch at the bottom of the screen to “On.”

You’ll note that it’s flagged as “Experimental.” I’ll explain more tomorrow about that and what that means for future updates, but it short it’s no more likely to eat all your bookmarks or do anything else nasty than the interface with Delicious.com.

Once support has been enabled the log in screen — accessed either by logging out from Delicious or launching the app — should now have a pinboard.in option.

The rest is exactly the same as when you’re logging into a normal non-Yahoo! ID Delicious.com account.

There is one caveat to this. If you don’t have a Delicious.com account and you want to log into a pinboard.in account on first launch you may find that the option you see in the screen above is missing. This is a bug that will be fixed in Yummy 2.5.1 but there is a work around: after you’ve changed the settings, try killing Yummy from the task switching menu (double-tap home, press and hold Yummy, press the “jiggling” icon).  You should find the option available next time you launch Yummy.

Categories
news trivia

iPad Support in Yummy 2.5

This came out if nowhere to become the number one request from users of Yummy. At the time I was, in all honesty, sceptical. I thought the iPhone version would be okay running on the iPad and that the full website would be usable. 
It didn’t take long using an iPad to realise that I was wrong. 

What do you get when you use Yummy on an iPad? 
All the same features but — to paraphrase Eric Morecambe — not necessarily in the same place. It uses the full screen of the device, supports all four orientations and, where appropriate, uses popups and so forth. 
Since creating the iPad version was a lot of work I did consider creating a new app or making it an in-app purchase, however in the end, because there are no iPad exclusive features, I decided to make it free for Yummy customers. Users of Yummy Browser will still get the pixel-doubling. 
Categories
news

Introducing: Yummy Browser 2.5

In all the excitement over the new release of Yummy we should not forget that it’s little brother, Yummy Browser, also got an update. 
As before, Yummy Browser inherits all the core features of the full version of Yummy. That is: the improved log in process; the support for iOS4 and iPhone 4; the count of bookmarks behind each tag. 

Users stuck on older versions of iOS will note that it now remembers which screen you were on last.

For the sake of clarity, Yummy Browser lacks the following major features from the full version of Yummy:

  • Add, Edit and Delete bookmarks
  • View webpages directly inside the app, i.e., without switching to Safari
  • View your Tag Bundles
  • iPad support
  • pinboard.in support
  • Search bookmarks
  • Post bookmarks to Twitter or Facebook
I’ve also taken the opportunity to switch from AdMod to Apple’s iAd.
Categories
news

Introducing: Yummy 2.5

I am pleased to announce that Yummy 2.5 is making its way to the App Store ready for download. It’s a free update for all existing users and the usual “tier 2” price for everyone else — that is, $1.99, £1.19, €1.59, ¥230 or your local equivalent.


What’s new?


Visually, you might notice the revised icon:





And there’s quite a lot of new functionality too:

  • iPad support
  • iOS4 support
  • “Retina display” support for iPhone 4 and the new iPod touches
  • A count of the number of bookmarks that each tag has
  • Experimental pinboard.in support
  • Improvements to the Yahoo! ID authorisation process
  • Post to Twitter using Osfoora
  • Shorten your links using uCut.it
  • The usual other bug fixes and refinements
I’ll be posting about each of these features — or at least those that make sense — over the following week. I’ve already written about what you can expect in the iPad version and what effect the multi-tasking will (or won’t) have.

Or you can just download your copy now!
Categories
news trivia

Second Anniversary


Two years ago today, on 2nd September 2008, Yummy 1.0 first hit the App Store. A big thank you to everyone who has downloaded a copy.

I was going to commemorate the occasion with version 2.5, unfortunately my laptop had other ideas.

Broken Hard Disk
I made the final build and shut the lid while I ate dinner. Afterwards, I just got the spinning beachball of death. No access to any of the files; no way to submit the new version to iTunes.
The good news is that I have installed a replacement disk and am well on the way to restoring my MacBook to its former glory. With luck, version 2.5 will hit the App Store not two years after version one but two years and one week later. (Nearly 90% of updates are being approved within seven days.)