Year: 2015

Categories
news

Yummy 3.0.1

Yummy 3 was a massive update. It was effectively a completely new app with very little shared with the version that it replaced. Inevitably, sadly, some bugs made it through into the finished version, despite lots of testing by myself and the largest number of beta testers I’ve ever had for a new app. (Please let me know if you’d like to be added to the beta list.)

iOS Simulator Screen Shot 13 Mar 2015 12.16.41
Yummy 3: Tag list view

Version 3.0.1 is all about resolving as many of those issues are possible:

  • Fixed a bunch of crashing bugs. Most were pretty obscure, happening rarely to a small number of users, but that’s no excuse. A better excuse is that I wasn’t able to reproduce most of them so the fixes are somewhat speculative.
  • Performance improvements. The slowest thing in Yummy (all versions) is dealing with tags. I’ve made it quite a lot quicker, though you’ll likely only really notice during the initial sync or when migrating from Yummy 2.
  • Fix the add bookmark functionality. This was the most embarrassing bug to make it into the final version.
  • Fixes and performance improvements to the migration from Yummy 2. This should fix the syncing and share extension troubles that some users have been experiencing. There is a workaround.
  • Workaround for a bug in Pocket that meant that you couldn’t save bookmarks using Yummy’s share extension.
  • Improvements to “get webpage title” functionality.
  • Dismiss keyboard when saving a bookmark.
  • A new alternative to the “tag cloud” screen, which looks pretty much the same as the tag screen in Yummy 2, including the count of bookmarks.
  • Updates to the versions of a number of open source components used.

I don’t normally include this much detail when talking about bug fix updates but I think it’s important to detail what’s going on this time.

I’m sorry if you’ve been affected by any of the bugs and I hope this release makes Yummy more usable again. Thank you to the users who submitted crash reports or emailed me with their thoughts or observations. As the App Store description notes: I can’t fix problems I don’t know about.

Yummy 3.0.1 is currently with Apple for review. It should be out soon.

Categories
news

Yummy 3.0

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Yummy 3.o on the App Store.

As discussed previously, it’s a complete, ground-up rewrite of Yummy 2.x, taking full advantage of all the hardware and software advances since the very first iPhone, which is what the old version was designed for.

Highlights of the new version are… well.. too many to mention all them, but the short version is:

  • Multi-account support (requires IAP)
  • Full text search (requires IAP)
  • Improved syncing engine
  • Fetch new bookmarks in the background — no waiting to sync on launch
  • Better support for Pinboard.in
  • New icon
  • Share extension
  • Handover
  • iPhone 6 and 6+ support

A few minor features have not made the cut for 3.0. If there’s anything you would like to see added back, please contact us.

This is a huge update. We hope you like it an appreciate all the hard work that went into it. If you have nice things to say about it, please write a review in the App Store. If not, please contact us using the feedback link in the About Box. We’ve love to hear your thoughts, both good and bad.

Categories
news

Preview: Yummy 3.0

Where to start with introducing Yummy 3.0? It’s pretty much a ground-up rewrite of our full-features Delicious and Pinboard.in client, designed with modern Apple hardware and the latest version of iOS in mind. That’s to say, it has all the features that you rely on but it works even better than before.

I’m generally of the opinion that you shouldn’t rewrite working software. However, Yummy 2 (“still the only Delicious.com client for iPhone and iPod touch that allows you to edit bookmarks”), released in January 2009, was designed for the original iPhone. The original iPhone had 128Mb memory and single, slow CPU core. Modern iPads have three fast, 64-bit cores, 2Gb of memory, Retina displays… there’s so little in common that it’s amazing that Yummy still works at all!

It became pretty much impossible to to migrate the architecture from this old world to the new one without rewriting the database, the sync engine and much of the UI. But those three things are the app. If those things change beyond recognition, there wouldn’t be much of the original left anyway.

Of course, there’s no point in just moving forward technically. There has to be something in it for people other than me. I think you’ll like what’s there.

The two big new features are multi-account support and full text support.

Previously Yummy worked with both Delicious and Pinboard, but not at the same time. Now you can be logged into many accounts at the same time, browsing and searching across all of them. (My concerns about adding this in the past — performance — are still present but with modern hardware the bar is so high that most people will never find it.)

In Yummy 2.x you could search your tags, bookmark titles or description, but you could search for the occurrence of a word in any of those three fields. Yummy 3.0 breaks that limit. It has “full text search,” meaning that it looks anywhere to find a match.

Of course, there’s lot more but I’ll leave some of those details for later.

Yummy 3 is nearly ready for release. It is feature complete with some finesse and bug fixing left before release. If you’d like to help, please let me know and I will add you to the beta testing list.

Categories
trivia

KSBDA International Spring Exhibition

I’m very late writing this, but I thought it was worth commemorating even very much belatedly.

Rootn Tootn‘s icon and logo were shown in an exhibit last year. In the words of the designer:

Rootn Tootn graphic artwork was shown at the 2014 KSBDA International Spring Exhibition, May 31st through June 5th, 2014, at University of Seoul in Korea. It hung among works of designers and professors from more than 5 countries beside Korean designers and professors. Totally 300 plus works were exhibited.

(Bonus points if you can find the icon in any of the pictures in the link!)

Rootn Tootn Logo
Rootn Tootn Logo

I’m really happy with the design work for that app and I’m glad it was put on display for a much wider audience. Next time I’ll try to find out about it beforehand!

Categories
news

Mac Calendar Widget

Today Widget
Today Widget

I just uploaded a simple calendar widget that appears in Notification Centre of your Yosemite-powered Mac. It doesn’t connect to the system-wide Calendar, instead it just displays a simple month view.

It’s currently source-only — so you need to be a developers or at least comfortable with Xcode — but is pretty much feature complete.

As is often the way when you write software for a living, I found a problem and I felt the need to fix it. As with most of these problems, it took longer than I anticipated but I’m quite happy with the result.

Categories
news

Smart App Banner 1.1.0

The first new release of 2015 is my Wordpress plugin, Smart App Banner.

Version 1.1.0, rather than insisting that you remember (or copy and paste) the app IDs, remembers them for you and gives you a dropdown list when you add a new post:

Dropdown list of apps
Dropdown list of apps

Once selected, the details are filled in. You can then customise them before saving.

You can define the list of apps in the Settings menu. Editing entries here does not affect any of your existing posts, so don’t worry about experimenting and “breaking” something.

One question you may have: why doesn’t it keep a central list of apps, allowing you to update them all in one place if you want? Unfortunately there are too many edge cases, making it difficult to code and awkward to define sensible defaults or Undo mechanisms. For example, what happens if you delete an app? How would you deal with the affiliate data and app argument? (Those last two fields probably vary from page to page anyway.)

It’s a small thing (that due to the “wonders” of PHP took longer than I’d have hoped to implement) but very useful I think. I hope you like it.