Year: 2011

Categories
faq news

Bye-bye Yahoo! ID

With the transfer of ownership from Yahoo! to AVOS, a number of changes have taken place. If you use the website you’ll see that the “look and feel” has changed.

The other main user-facing change is that you can no longer use your Yahoo! ID to log in — which makes sense since it’s no longer owned by Yahoo!

So if you already own Yummy, you’ll need to log out and then back in again with the username that you created when you agreed to transfer over to AVOS.

If you’ve just bought Yummy, then please do not select the Yahoo! ID option when logging in for the first time. It won’t work and you’ll get some weird error messages!

The new version of Yummy that I will be submitting shortly will make this easier.

Categories
news

The New Delicious.com

The new AVOS-owned Delicious.com site went live a couple of hours ago. Unfortunately they seem to have made changes in the developer interface (API) that are causing Yummy to crash when attempting to sync.

Worse, this is the complete documentation for the changes:

Documentation for developers

Coming Soon!

I have already mailed them to ask for more information. With luck, once I’m back in front of my Mac, I’ll be able to figure it out without help.

But until then, it’s probably safest to assume that Yummy will not work with your Delicious.com account.

I’ll update this post with more information when I have it.

Update, 28 September

I’ve identified a fix and am currently testing it. I will submit it to Apple as soon as I can (hopefully tomorrow).

The crash is caused by a change in the way that Delicious supports syncing bookmarks. Previously they had a concept called “meta” that meant you could see which bookmarks had changed so that you didn’t have to download all the bookmarks every time. That feature is no longer present. This means that Yummy will take longer to sync each time you try, especially if you have a large number of bookmarks.

Update, 30 September

I was wrong about the missing “meta.” Instead they changed something else: you can no longer POST requests, only GET them. The good news is that the downside of the previous solution is no longer correct. However, syncing a lot of bookmarks will be slower than before.

I hope to submit a new fix to Apple this weekend. With luck it will be on your devices by this time next week. Please cross your fingers!

Categories
news

Welcome Wandle

Since it’s been a while since Yummy 2.6.1 came out I thought it might be worth a quick post to talk about what’s been happening behind the scenes. Despite appearances to the contrary, I’ve been very busy!

First, and I mention this for the sake of completeness, is the new website. What you’re seeing right now is probably what I’d call “Phase One” and is already a vast improvement over what came before it. In the future I will put up more content, with the intention of explaining the product to new users more effectively and allowing existing users to get the most out of it.

I have release 2.6.2 of Yummy waiting in the wings. It’s pretty much ready to go (though I do keep making minor changes) and has been for a while now. I’m waiting for two things before pressing the ‘go’ button.

It’s mostly minor bug fixes and behind the scenes changes, but one aspect that you will see is the removal of the Yahoo! ID authentication method. (Yes, Yummy was the first to add support for it and will likely be the first to remove it!) Once the sale to AVOS finally goes through, this method will be no more and will just cause confusion to new users. However, while they said that the deal would go through in July I can see no signs that this has actually happened.

Having said that, even if the deal had gone through, until yesterday I was unable to submit updates to any of my apps. This is because I am putting Yummy on a more formal footing and have formed a company, called Wandle Software Limited, to be the legal guardian of all my iOS software. Transitioning my developer account from that of an individual to a company took nearly seven weeks. For this time I was unable to make changes or work on beta releases.

For you this change makes very little difference. For me I get an awful lot of extra paperwork to fill in, but on the plus side I have a new corporate logo.

Finally, the next major version of Yummy will likely be numbered 3.0 and it will be a significant update. Major new releases take much longer to develop and test than smaller ones. I have multiple aims for this new version, spanning the UI, new features and an important overhaul of some of the technical stuff under the hood. I’ll write more about this as it nears release.

Categories
news

New website!

Welcome to the new Yummy website!

Until today, this website has been hosted using Google’s Blogger service. This is nice and easy and free, but if you came here to try to understand what Yummy does or how it works it’s not entirely obvious how you would do that.

So with this iteration, I have put all the features and screenshots front and centre. I have also tried to be a little more “social,” making better use of Yummy’s Twitter feed and liberally sprinkling Facebook and Twitter buttons around. If you like Yummy I hope you’ll help trying to spread the word.

In the near future I will add some page that explain the features more and link to some of the videos that are already on YouTube (and some new ones).

I have done what I can to bring everything from the old website over but I am sure there there have been some casualties. If you find anything serious please let me know.

Categories
support

That Syncing Feeling

One of the most common support emails I get is when users have a problem syncing with Delicious (or Pinboard.in). In this post I hope to cover the most common problems and their solutions.

Maybe the first thing to discuss is why, if Yummy has been on sale since 2008, are users still having problems with something as basic as downloading bookmarks? The short answer is that there there are three major components that need to be working correctly for the process to complete, only one of which is Yummy. The others are the network and Delicious.com itself.

“Delicious.com says that you’re refreshing too quickly”

If Delicious.com thinks that you’re connecting to their servers too often, they stop responding to your requests. This is most likely to happen if you try to sync multiple clients in rapid succession or, perhaps, start Yummy syncing and press the “Home” button on your iPhone. Yummy does not currently continue syncing in the background so the next time you launch it, it starts the whole process again.

The answer here is to exit Yummy and wait a while before trying again. You might also try switching to a different network (e.g., from 3G to WiFi) and try again.

Error Code 999

This is Delicious’ general error; “Something went wrong but we’re not exactly sure what.” In practice is means pretty much the same thing as the ‘refreshing too quickly’ error and can be treated in exactly the same way.

Error Code 500

There are two possible sources for this message. If the error comes directly from Delicious, then your best option is simply to wait a bit and try again. These problems are usually temporary and they usually fix themselves.

Alternatively, it could be your wireless connection. 3G networks, especially, sometimes do weird things with messages before they get to their destination. The quick-and-dirty solution is just to use a different network. WiFi networks are usually more reliable and quicker and have fewer oddities.

The other option is to go into the settings and change the “Sync Speed” option. This will either be set to “Fastest” or “Normal” depending on how you authenticate with Delicious. If you switch this to a slower setting it should make the syncing more reliable, albeit slower.

“The certificate for this server is invalid”

This has happened around the middle of May for the last couple of years. It means that Yahoo! have forgotten to renew their SSL certificates (or that something has been misconfigured). This means that your iPhone cannot establish a secure connection with the Delicious.com servers and, therefore, refuses to continue.

The solution to this is to wait until Yahoo! renew and correctly configure their certificate.

Categories
howto news

In brief

A couple of quick things that I thought might be worth making more public. (I’ve already tweeted about both of these issues.)

First, if you’re experiencing “The certificate for this server is invalid” errors, this is because Yahoo! have not fully updated all their servers with a new SSL certificate. They said that they fixed this yesterday but I still see the problem myself (though, funnily enough, I wasn’t getting it yesterday).

I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do here. We will just have to wait until Yahoo! finish updating their servers.  There’s a thread on their support forums if you’d like to keep an eye on progress.

Secondly, if you follow any of the Apple or iPhone press, even some of the mainstream media, you will probably have seen that a company is threatening to sue developers of some iOS software over some patents. As a precaution I have remove Yummy Browser and www.cut from sale in the US App Store. The full version of Yummy is still available world-wide.

I’ll have them back in the App Store as soon as the situation has been resolved.

Categories
howto news

YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious

“Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.”

It’s early days yet, so no-one outside Yahoo and the YouTube guys knows exactly what’s going to happen, but I think the signs for Delicious are largely positive.

In the short term, they are asking users with Delicious accounts linked to their Yahoo! ID to convert them back to normal Delicious.com accounts. Of course Yummy has always supported this type of authentication. Indeed, since 2.6 access in this way is actually both quicker and more reliable than using a Yahoo! ID protected account.

I immediately converted my account over to see what happens. And the short answer, from the Yummy side, is nothing. Everything continues to work as normal.

At some point it will probably require you to log in again. There’s a small bug here. When you log out and back into the same account again, Yummy will show no bookmarks. Don’t worry, your bookmarks are still there. Just add a new bookmark or (from the Delicious.com website) edit one of your existing links and Yummy will synchronise correctly. This will be fixed in the next version.

Categories
news

Announcing: Yummy for iPod shuffle

I’m very pleased to announce a new addition to the Yummy family: Yummy for iPod shuffle. It has most of the features you know and love from the iPhone and iPad versions but it comes with a completely new and innovative user interface, designed from the ground up to fully utilise the unique display technology of Apple’s smallest portable music player.

I could write pages about the painstaking research that went into the interface, the countless hours in usability labs and the months of engineering effort but what you really want to know it what it looks like and how it works. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.

(Image Courtesy of Apple)

When we first started discussing the idea, people said that it was impossible to run sophisticated applications on such a small device. Some doubted that it would be useable. Some even doubted that is was possible to connect to the Internet on hardware without a radio or ethernet port.

With the immediate availability of Yummy for iPod shuffle we think that those doubts have been thoroughly quashed. You can download it for a promotional price of 99¢ from the little known App Store for iPod shuffle. We hope you like it.

Categories
faq howto news support

Yummy 2.6: Bookmark editing

I discussed the new bookmark view yesterday. Today I’d like to talk about the new editing view.

In the past I’ve heard a few complaints about this screen. Firstly, the navigation was a little… quirky. Secondly, there just wasn’t enough space to add as many tags as people wanted. Thirdly, you had to type in all the tags. A few versions ago I added a way to pick from your existing tags and, while most people agreed that it was useful, many wished for something more like in the Mail app. And finally, I got complaints that you had to manually enter the bookmark title.

In Yummy 2.6 I present a completely new editing screen.

I think it’s fair to say that all these suggestions have been addressed.
Rather than try to squeeze everything onto one screen as happened with the previous version, Yummy 2.6 now places each of the major fields in separate tabs. This leaves plenty of space to enter your notes, tags and a title.
It also allowed me to address the other requests. For a long time it’s been possible to get Yummy to find the title of a web page, but a number of people never found it. The extra space means that there’s a big button above the tab bar and below the text box.
For entering tags, as you can see in the screen shot, Yummy will suggest the top four tags starting with the letters you’ve started typing. When there are three or fewer suggestions, the right-most button takes you to the edit screen, much as it did in the previous versions. One “glitch” you may notice is that long tags flow over the bounds of each button. This does, I’ll concede, look a little messy but by truncating each tag it would make it difficult to distinguish between some longer words. I felt that being useful trumped being pretty.
Categories
faq news

Yummy 2.6: Bookmark view

The bookmark view is one of the most used in Yummy and yet it has barely changed since version 1.0. I thought it was about time that changed since there were a number of things that have always bugged me about it.

Here’s how it looks in Yummy 2.6.

Key improvements are that you can see the full title and all your tags, no matter how long the title is and no matter how many tags you have. (I left the URL truncated if too long as I didn’t think that was that terribly important. Let me know if you’d always like to see the full line.)

A small point maybe, but I think it’s much more attractive than the old version, too.

Paired with this new bookmark view is the new editing view. I’ll talk about that a little more tomorrow.