Categories
howto support tutorial

Instapaper Integration

Okay, so you’ve got Yummy, you’ve heard that the latest version allows you to post your bookmarks to Instapaper from Delicious for off-line reading but how do you do it?

  1. Quit Yummy
  2. Open the Settings application and select Yummy
  3. Enter your Instapaper username in the box at the top of the screen
  4. Back in Yummy you’ll now find the “Send to Instapaper” option in the “Action” button at the bottom of the bookmark and web preview screen. If you don’t have a password, then you’re done
  5. If you do have a password press the button anyway. You’ll get the opportunity to enter your password using a screen that looks a lot like this:

    The screen will check your password before proceeding so you do need to be online for this to happen
  6. When you press done, you’ll need to select the “Send to Instapaper” button again to send your link to Instapaper

Easy, eh?

Categories
support trivia tutorial

Bookmarking to Delicious from Twitterrific

Back in February I documented how to publish a bookmark to Delicious using TwitterFon and Yummy. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a simple or convenient method — building your own program is not for everyone!

Luckily if you use Twitterrific things just got easier.

If you go into the Advanced Settings screen in Twitterrific you’ll see the following:

(Yes, you can post bookmarks to Instapaper here too. If you have a password you might prefer to use Yummy to do that until The Icon Factory push out an update.)

Enter “yummy://post?” into the “Delicious.com” field (without the quotes) and you’re done.

Next time you click on a link you’ll also be able to send it to Yummy. Two limitations I’ve noticed. Firstly the link you get is likely to be shortened (for example “http://is.gd/enCu”). Secondly, the title field will not be populated. I am going to look into what I can do to help here.

Categories
news support

Yummy Browser 1.0.1

A minor update to Yummy Browser, version 1.0.1, has just hit the App Store. This release includes all the bug fixes and security enhancements that made it into Yummy 2.2.1.

The key changes that you’re likely to notice are:

  • You will find that the Settings application no longer has an option to enter your password. It is now stored more securely in your iPhone’s keychain. If you change your delicious.com password, Yummy will prompt you for your new password
  • If you have a jail-broken handset you should find that the tag view works now

It’s available right now for free on the App Store.

Categories
news support

Yummy 2.2.1

It’s been a long time coming, but version 2.2.1 of Yummy has finally hit the App Store. It contains only one fix: you can now use Instapaper accounts with a password set.

It is a free download for all existing owners of Yummy.

Categories
opinion trivia

Pirates and Jail-break

I just read this post by PlanetBeing about Apple’s relationship with the jail-break and application cracking community. While I have some sympathy with his position I can’t wholeheartedly agree. There are rational reasons why developers and Apple might not support jail-breaking even if it does nothing to help extinguish piracy.

Back in March when I wrote about my experience with Yummy users who have jail-broken handsets I tried to be very careful to make a distinction between the process of jail-breaking and that of pirating apps. In principle I have no problem with people freeing their phones from the shackles that Apple include.

However, one of the nice things about developing for the iPhone is that it is a closed system. When you write a program for the Mac or Windows or Solaris you have to deal with all kinds of variables that you have no control over. Does your program work when someone plugs in a ten year old scanner? When they plug in an iSCSI disk? With five monitors? When they virtualise the OS? When they use Solaris Zones? (All these are actual problems I’ve come across over the years I’ve worked in IT.) Fundamentally you just don’t know. While you wouldn’t expect them to make a difference, you can’t count them out. And when you’re supporting software you have to take into account the costs of tracking down, identifying and fixing these obscure problems that you can’t actually see on your own hardware.

On the iPhone, as with most games consoles, you have none of this. An iPhone is an iPhone. You can rely on the amount of memory available. You know there’s one screen with one size. The few areas of variation are well known.

When people start changing the operating system, as happens when you jail-break a phone, all these things you can rely on become, well, less reliable. It can be small things like performance tuning. With a stock iPhone I can try to make my application responsive because I know how aggressively I can cache data. Jail-broken phones often have less, sometime substantially less, memory available. (Actually, I say a small thing. For an application within certain bounds performance is a “nice to have.” For a game your tolerances may be much smaller.)

More significantly, some system level components that you can usually rely on can change under your feet. In the case of the “blank tags” bug in Yummy it was because the version of SQLite sometimes changes when you jail-break.

I spent a significant amount of time trying to track this problem down and in the end only stumbled across the solution by accident.

What I’m trying to say here is that while we can agree that people who jail-break their handsets are not all stealing their applications, we cannot pretend that their actions have zero cost. The time that I spent tracking down the bug could have been better spent adding new features or fixing bugs that affect all users and not just a minority.

PlanetBeing says that the jail-break community does not “believe that Apple should have a support burden for modified devices.” I think developers of third party applications deserve a similar break.

Categories
news

April Update

If you’ve been following this blog you can hardly have failed to notice that the promised update to Yummy 2.2.1 has yet to materialise. This is mostly outside my control but I do apologise if you have been affected by the Instapaper password bug that this update was designed to solve.

I submitted the update to Apple and about ten days later I got the email that every iPhone developer dreads. It begins with the phrase, “Your application … cannot be posted to the App Store at this time.” With the little information that they sent with the rejection, I think that Yummy is actually fine and that Instapaper was having difficulty at the time that they were reviewing the update. (You’ll note that the reason they rejected it is nothing to do with passwords.)

Still, I have taken this as an opportunity to improve Yummy. As a precaution I have made a minor change to the way that bookmarks are sent to Instapaper. Now rather than just say that there was an error (if there was one), I have added distinct error messages for each of the possible failure conditions. Obviously this doesn’t make it work any better but it does mean that you can tell the difference between it being Yummy’s fault (“Instapaper request error”) and when it’s a problem on the Instapaper side (“Instapaper server error”). The messages are deliberately similar as neither is the fault of users of Yummy.

I’ll be submitting this revised update in the next couple of days and, with luck, it will be available in the next week or two. Fingers crossed.

Categories
news support

Untrusted Server Certificate

If you’re trying to do anything with Yummy that requires it to talk to the Delicious.com servers you may find that you’re getting a weird error message: “untrusted server certificate.” Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about this directly as the server in question is owned by Yahoo. The good news is that they’re on the case:

“We’re in the process of renewing this certificate. Thank you for the prompt alerts everybody.

We had our dates mixed up and thought it expired next week.”

Hopefully you should be back Delicious-ing before you know it.

Categories
support

Yummy 2.2 Status

I’ve had a couple of reports about Yummy crashing when you try to enter an Instapaper password. The good news is that I have found the problem and am just testing a fix before submitting it to Apple.

The bad news is that this is likely to affect everyone who has a password set on their Instapaper account. A quick workaround is to temporarily remove the password from your Instapaper account.

My apologies to everyone who is affected by this bug.

Categories
news

Out now: Yummy 2.2

It’s been a busy week around Yummy HQ hence the delay in posting this! But in case you haven’t already noticed, the new version of Yummy is now out and available on the iTunes Store. Key new features are:

  • Instapaper integration
  • New bookmark list view, with a preview of the URL and a lock icon to indicate private links
  • Animated bookmark name, so long links are visible without making the text un-readably small

I’m going to talk about these features a little more over the coming week. There is also the usual collection of minor bug fixes and enhancements, the ones most likely to affect you being:

  • Users with jail-broken handsets should now see all their tags correctly
  • The “notes” field in the bookmark screen now shows “placeholder” text explaining what it is
  • The “suggest tags” button is now more obvious
  • Fix for crash when you edit a bookmark and add multiple spaces between tags
  • Improvements to the synchronisation process with Delicious.com

I am also in the process of creating a new release of Yummy Browser that incorporates all the bug fixes. After that I am going to start to plan the next release of Yummy. If you want to influence that process please head over to my Uservoice page and cast your vote or add your suggestions.

Categories
news

Yummy 2.2

I have just uploaded Yummy version 2.2 to Apple for review so, hopefully, you’ll get the chance to download it in the next few days.

A lot has gone into this, but a few highlights are as follows:

  • Instapaper integration
  • New bookmark list view, with a preview of the URL and a lock icon to indicate private links
  • Animated bookmark name, so long links are visible without making the text un-readably small

To the left you can see what the new tag view looks like. The view by date and search looks very similar, as you might imagine. I’ll upload a video to YouTube when I get the chance. More details about the controls and options once 2.2 is live.

I am particularly excited about the Instapaper integration.

Instapaper is a neat service that allows you to read web content offline in an optimised text-only format.

More about all these features later when you can actually see them. Stay tuned.