Since there has been little visible activity here for the last month or two, I thought it might be a good time to let you know what’s happening with Yummy and where things are heading.
In short the next version is nearing completion and I hope to send it to Apple in the next couple of weeks. I’m not going to talk about features in this post but one thing that I would like to mention is that version 2.4 will be the first release to require iPhone OS 3.x. Until now Yummy has run on all version of iPhone OS that have the App Store (i.e., 2.0 and above), but the new OS has been out long enough and there are so few users of older versions that I think it’s time to make the jump.
Release 2.4 has a bit of a checkered history. I originally hoped to make it available before the end of last year but then Yahoo! threw a spanner in the works and I had to spend a lot of time writing code to support the new Yahoo! ID log in scheme. I figured that not doing this would put me at a big disadvantage when my competitors updated but so far Yummy remains the only Delicious client on the iPhone that supports the new log in scheme.
I also spent an unusually large amount of time working on features that never made it into the shipping version. This always happens to some degree, but one “biggie” ended up being discarded and another was repurposed. This meant that a couple of other features ended up being pushed out of this release altogether.
However, all the work on the Yahoo! ID scheme meant that another feature, one planned for version 3 or later, became much easier and was therefore brought forward to this release.
I know I’m teasing a bit here. Details will follow shortly.
At the same time I am also progressing an update to www.cut, my quick URL shortening app. This was originally to be a minor update due before Yummy 2.4 but is likely to make it out shortly afterwards, hopefully before the end of March.
Next, like many other iPhone developers I have been looking at the recently announced iPad and wondering how well my applications would work on it. To be clear, Yummy should work just fine as it is but I’m curious if there are ways that I can make better use of the increased screen real-estate.
In short I think there is but the current UI will need to be rewritten. If I go down that route I want it to be a proper iPad application and not just a quick hack.
To that end, I have just started work on Yummy 3.0. This is a complete, ground-up re-write with some new ideas and a new approach to managing your delicious.com bookmarks. At this stage it’s more sketching thing out on paper and prototyping small pieces of code than hard-core development but some ideas are staring to take shape.
It’s at such an early stage that I’m not going to make any estimates as to when you might expect to see it. It is likely be a while, so there will be more point releases in the 2.x line.
So, in summary, there will be a few updates to look out for in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
