Wandle SoftwareI submitted a new version of Yummy to Apple late last week. Hopefully it will be approved by Apple soon. There are just two bug fixes in this release, but they seemed important enough to warrant an update.
Neither of these bugs affect Yummy Browser so that will remain on version 2.6.4.
A couple of days ago I submitted a minor update to Yummy (and Yummy Browser) to Apple and they are both now live in the App Store. It’s still “Waiting for review” so I don’t know when it will be available, but hopefully it will be soon.
There are a few, minor internal changes but the following were either reported directly by users, ones I’ve seen crash reports for or things you might notice:
The last one is pretty important if you use Delicious. It means that you should continue to use spaces to delimit your tags, even though the website now uses commas. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, there are problems with using spaces in your tags. I’d recommend not using spaces until Delicious have fixed their API.
Update: It took some time, but Delicious finally updated their API to support commas as a tag delimiter. You can read more about the update here.
In the olden days, say a month or so ago, things were much simpler. In both Delicious and Pinboard.in, you listed your tags separated by spaces. This worked both on the websites and in all third party apps.
But in late October that changed. (I don’t know the exact date, since I can’t find a blog announcing it.) Delicious decided to switch over to using commas to separate tags. The problem with using spaces to separate tags, they say, is that the tags themselves, for obvious reasons, cannot contain spaces.
However, the problem with using commas is that Delicious have not completely updated their systems to make it work with third party clients.
Let me explain.
When Yummy, or indeed any third party client, sends a list of tags to Delicious, it is expected to send a comma separated list.
When Yummy receives bookmarks from Delicious, they arrive delimited by spaces.
For example, if you enter “tag1,tag 2,tag3” on the Delicious web site, it will send that back to Yummy as “tag1 tag 2 tag3” which it has no way of interpreting as anything other than four distinct tags.
So, what should you do?
With the current version of Yummy (2.6.3), you should add and edit tags delimited with commas. I would recommend not using spaces.
I will be submitting a new version (2.6.4) in the next few days. In this, you should enter tags separated by spaces. Yummy will convert them to commas behind the scenes. But, even then, you should probably not use spaces in your tags until Delicious fix things at their end.
I would concede that this is not great. This is not the first time that Delicious has broken their API and I’m getting pretty sick of it to be honest! If you’d like to help, you can add your voice to the bug report that I raised on the Delicious support site.
If you’re using Delicious and you’re seeing a lot of 502 errors… you’re not alone.
The good news is that they’re mostly benign. Just press refresh and it usually works just fine.
Since I never saw these errors before AVOS took over and because I see them on the website itself, I am pretty confident that it is not a problem in Yummy. If I find a way to avoid exposing these errors to you I will, of course, provide an update.
In case you missed it, Delicious have announced that:
We plan to take the system offline this Wednesday, 19 Oct, from 10 PM to 2 AM PST in order to update our data tier and make some improvements to our search infrastructure.
I am assuming that this means that the site and the API’s will be inaccessible for those four hours. Practically speaking, this means that you won’t be able to sync Yummy.
However, adding, editing and deleting of bookmarks in Yummy will continue to work and any changes you make should sync back to Delicious when they’re back online.
I’ve been running the iOS 5 beta’s since late July and have not seen any major problems in all that time, so I think you’re unlikely to have any problems. Of course, please let me know if you do see anything untoward.
Having said that, Yummy does not have any iOS 5 exclusive features. It still uses its inbuilt Twitter client rather than the one built into iOS; there’s no iCloud support or any of the other nice and shiny new stuff.
I have just submitted release 2.6.3 of Yummy and Yummy Browser to Apple for review. It’s an urgent release for a very small number of users — and will make absolutely no difference to everyone else!
Those users are people who tried and partially succeeded in downloading their bookmarks after Delicious transferred ownership from Yahoo! to AVOS.
Update: 10 October In pretty much record time, both apps have been approved.
Even for those affected users, there is a work around:
Both Yummy and Yummy Browser version 2.6.2 are now available for download on the App Store.
In some ways it’s significant not for what it adds but for what it removes. Since Delicious is no longer owned by Yahoo!, I have removed Yahoo! ID support and made some minor modifications so that it works correctly with the new, AVOS-owned Delicious.
One thing that I have noticed recently is a number of “502” errors. Just retrying seems to work most of the time. I’m pretty certain that this is a problem at the Delicious end, though I am continuing to investigate.
I have just submitted a new version of Yummy to Apple. Although a comparatively small update it’s an important one:
Apple say that they’re approving over 90% of updates within seven days, so… fingers crossed.