Wandle Software
As of this week you can fill the dock on your iPhone or iPod touch completely with Wandle Software apps. I know that’s not significant in the big scheme of things but I like to think that it’s quite an achievement for a one-man shop that operates part-time.
From left-to-right, and in the order that they were released, there is Yummy, Yummy Browser (the “lite” version of Yummy), www.cut and, new this month, Rootn Tootn.
The last time I released a new app was 2009. I’ve been busy, there have been plenty of updates since then, but a completely new, version 1.0 app is something special. Since that last release, the App Store has grown enormously. Just about every imaginable category has a number of competing app so I think it’s important to explain where Rootn Tootn, our new baby feed timer and reminder app, fits in and why you should consider buying it instead of one of its more established competitors.
After looking around the app store, I think you can put most competitors into one of two categories.
The first is what I’ll label “all-encompassing apps.” They record every last detail about your baby. Measurements for everything, eye colour, height, weight, inoculations, diaries, and… and… oh, and reminders.
Well, it all sounds great in principle but are you ever actually going to enter any of that information? Don’t all those extra options get in the way of the information that you really need?
So the guiding principle of Rootn Tootn is simplicity. You really only ever have to press a single button: to start the timer. It’s been designed to require as little of your time as possible. Let’s face it, time is at a premium, especially straight after birth.
Later I searched for a different term and came up with a bunch of other apps. They were very simple, had “baby” colours and confusing UIs.
I don’t believe that being a parent means you have to surrender to the cliches of pinks and blues, of cutsie clipart and baby language.
Rootn Tootn allows you to put your own pictures in the background and overlays your timers. Simple and clean. Honestly, would you rather see some clipart or a photograph of your own baby?
The confusing UIs were puzzling. Many are limited. Want a timer for anything other than feeding? Sorry. Have two babies, both on slightly different schedules? Nope.
In Rootn Tootn I think the simplicity belies a surprising depth. You can have as many timers as you like; you can have custom reminders; you can record the details (or not); you can add notes (or not); activities can have a duration (feeding) or just a frequency (changing a nappy/diaper).
So, back to the question posed in the first paragraph: why you should consider Rootn Tootn instead of one of its more established competitors? I think it offers a great balance between simplicity and features that you’ll actually use. It saves you time, it’s easy to use and it looks great. What more could you want?
You’ve seen the description. You’ve seen some screenshots. But you’ve not seen Rootn Toon in action yet.
I’m very pleased to announce Wandle Software’s latest app, Rootn Tootn. Here’s the description from the App Store:
Rootn Tootn is a quick and effective way to remind you when your baby needs feeding or changing — or as we like to say, your baby is rooting and tooting…
Especially in the first few weeks when you’re feeding around the clock, it’s easy to lose track of what needs to happen and when. The last thing you want is an app that insists on endless details just to get started. Rootn Tootn just has a single button to start or stop a timer. It automatically records all the details for your reference and sets a reminder for the next time. You can add notes if you like.
You can add as many reminders as you want and there are three different types. One records the duration of an event (feeding for example), one is a point in time (changing a diaper/nappy) and one is a left/right side reminder. Check out the website for stories of how other people use them.
In addition to customising the timers and reminders, you can personalise how it looks by adding your own picture to the background.
Rootn Tootn offers a great balance between simplicity and features that you’ll use. Created using feedback from nursing mothers, we are always happy to hear how you’re using the app.
It was inspired by the birth of my son exactly six months ago today. You can get it on the iOS App Store for the introductory price of US$1.99, ¥170, €1.59, £1.49 or your local equivalent.
You can read more about it on the product page and, of course, there will be more more in this blog in the coming days.
Today a new EU Directive came into effect. It’s called the EU Cookie Directive or, to give it its official name, 2009/136/ec. What this means is that any website in the EU needs to obtain permission from its users before using cookies.
Cookies are just small files that are stored on your computer that allows websites to remember stuff between visits. They remember preferences, things that make your visit easier and more pleasurable, and can be used to record anonymous analytics (which pages are popular, where people find the site from, etc).
WandleSoftware.com needs the following cookies:
Apparently for UK-based sites, this may have recently changed to requiring “implied consent.” It seems to me that if the directive passes various legal appeals in Brussels then the UK will have to take the common meaning and revert to active consent. Partly because of that and partly because I want to be absolutely transparent about what I’m doing, I have added a confirmation when you first visit the site. Hopefully it won’t get in the way.
A week later than I had originally planned, but here is another app update that has been submitted to Apple for approval. In some ways it’s a bigger update than the 0.0.1 increment might lead you to believe. But let’s start with the user-visible changes:
The second item has pretty much the same caveats I mentioned in www.cut 3.1: it’s designed to be quicker than the functionality it replaces, though it is sometimes less accurate. That is, websites that do “clever” things with the title, such as using frames (1996 called…) or updating with Java Script after the initial load, may well fail. But overall I think the speed-gain is a net win.
The greater performance made one extra feature possible. Last month I mentioned a flaw in Delicious’ new “get links from Twitter” functionality. Namely, that those bookmarks when pulled into Yummy lack the website title. (As a quick aside, it’s only because of what’s arguably a bug in Yummy that these bookmarks could be saved at all. Normally the title is a mandatory field.)
In Yummy 2.6.6, if, when downloading a bookmark, it finds that the title is missing it uses the new “Get title” feature to populate the field as you’d expect.
Three small points: if the bookmark has already been downloaded then Yummy will not go back and get the title. You can do this manually (press ‘Edit’, then ‘Get title’ and finally ‘Done’) or, if you have a lot of them, as I did, then you can simply log out and log back in again.
Secondly, the title does not come from Delicious, so I can’t guarantee that it will be the same. It should be most of the time, but if they differ it’s (probably) not a bug.
Thirdly, Yummy gets the titles after finishing its normal sync process. There is (currently) no status update posted on the main screen but you can see that’s it’s working because the “network activity” spinner in the status bar will be going.
If you don’t like this functionality (or it causes problems for some reason) I added a setting to disable it.
Keep an eye on Twitter (or the available updates in the App Store) for when it makes it out of Cupertino.
I have just submitted www.cut 3.1 to Apple for approval, so hopefully it should be available for download some time in the next week.
It’s mainly bug fixes and cosmetic updates, including new Retina graphics for the new iPad, but there’s one new feature that I hope you’ll like.
Previously when you Tweeted a link or sent it to Facebook, it sent just the link with no information about it. In this new version, you should get the title too.
A couple of minor caveats:
Still, I hope you find it useful.
I signed the App Maker’s Privacy Pledge. It was easy to do since the first paragraph pretty accurately summarises my thoughts:
We… value a long term relationship with customers who trust us over selling those same customers out to other companies for short term gains.
It says that I pledge:
This philosophy filters through all Wandle apps. They do exactly what they say they do. They don’t collect personal details (so there’s no need to out-out), they don’t “phone home,” I don’t have any information about you. They don’t even collect anonymous statistics.
I especially like the last paragraph of the pledge:
In short, our apps – not our customers – are our products.
I’ve had a few queries about this, both by email and UserVoice. I’ve responded on Twitter already but I just realised that I’ve not said anything here.
For those that are not familiar with them, recently Delicious added a new feature where you can bundle a bunch of links together in a Stack. This, I suppose, has a similar use-case to Tag Bundles but rather than grouping bookmarks automatically using tags, you manually add them to a Stack.
It seems that they are a popular new feature.
Unfortunately, and the reason that they’re not in Yummy, is that they have not yet provided developer support for Stacks. There is no way that Yummy, or indeed any third party client, can request the information from Delicious.
If you would like to see Stacks in Yummy, I would suggest that you ask Delicious to allow API access to Stacks. While I can’t say how long it would take to implement and release, I can say that it’s a feature that I would like to see in Yummy myself.
You may have seen the new feature by Delicious that allows you to save all the links that you tweet. Neat idea, right?
Slightly flawed implementation, unfortunately. For the moment, if you’re a heavy Yummy user, you may be as well not enabling this option.
The problem is that while all the links get saved they don’t include their title; the tweet is included in the notes field, but the title is empty. (When pinboard.in do the same thing, they put the website name as the title and the tweet as the notes.) To be more specific, you can see the title on the website but they are not present in the API, which is how Yummy accesses all your bookmarks.
This does not cause any technical problems. Your bookmarks sync correctly. It just makes it a bit tricky to find them again since the don’t have a title.
I am looking a ways to improve the situation in Yummy — it already includes the ability to fetch a bookmarks title but it only works one link at a time — but hopefully the new team at Delicious might fix things first. Watch this space.