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.