Author: wandlesoftware

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Preview: Yummy 3.0

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date February 3, 2015

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.

Tags beta, bookmarks, delicious, pinboard, release, yummy

trivia

KSBDA International Spring Exhibition

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date January 20, 2015

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

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!

Tags art, design, rootn tootn

news

Mac Calendar Widget

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date January 15, 2015

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.

news

Smart App Banner 1.1.0

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date January 2, 2015

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

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.

Tags php, plugin, wordpress

trivia

2014

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date December 31, 2014

2014 was a busy year for us. Of course, we never completed everything we hoped to but we’ve achieved a lot.

Two new apps, CameraGPS and ShareEverywhere
Two further big updates to CameraGPS, and a couple of minor ones
Two further updates to ShareEverywhere
Four updates to Yummy
Five updates to Rootn Tootn, including the big, new 2.0 release

All that, plus some changes to www.cut that we’ve not been able to release.

For various reasons, it’s unlikely that we’ll get quite as much done in 2015 but we already have some exciting updates in progress. 2015 should be good.

trivia

EU Tax Changes

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date December 18, 2014

On 1st January 2015, the EU changes how VAT is calculated in cross-border transactions. How does this affect you as a consumer of apps and as a developer?

The short version: Apple have not announced changes of app pricing in Europe, so consumers will see no difference in 2015. Developers, however, will make slightly less money for each sale.

Following is the longer version.

Two important things. One is a change, the other is remaining. The status quo is retained on app pricing. Apple have not announced price changes and prices shown to consumers in the EU, unlike the US, always include tax.

The change is on how the tax is calculated. Previously, tax in the EU was calculated at the rate where the company (rather than the consumer) is located. Apple’s iTunes European base is Luxembourg, which is famed for having a relatively low tax rate of 17%.

From next year, the tax will be calculated at the rate of the country where the purchase is made. That is, when I’m buying from iTunes UK I’ll be paying 20% tax and when buying from, say, iTunes DK I’ll be paying 25% tax.

To work out your final figure the simplest way is just to read Apple’s documentation. But if you really want to do it yourself, take the figure seen in the App Store, say £1.49, take off the tax (20%) and then take off Apple’s split (30%). If there’s anything left, it’s yours. The worked example in this blog also still works.

The rates, taken from iTunes Connect, are as follows:

Country	VAT Rate
Austria	20%
Belgium	21%
Bulgaria	20%
Croatia	25%
Cyprus	19%
Czech Republic	21%
Denmark	25%
Estonia	20%
Finland	24%
France	20%
Germany	19%
Greece	23%
Hungary	27%
Iceland	24%
Ireland	23%
Italy	22%
Latvia	21%
Lithuania	21%
Luxembourg	17%
Malta	18%
Netherlands	21%
Poland	23%
Portugal	23%
Romania	24%
Slovakia	20%
Slovenia	22%
Spain	21%
Sweden	25%
UK	20%

(I hope you don’t have any Hungary-exclusive paid-for apps.)

I would assume that at some point Apple will start to adjust App Pricing to equalise around the world. If nothing else, some changes in the Russian store are likely very soon!

news

CameraGPS 1.2

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date December 10, 2014

CameraGPS 1.2 is a big update. I toyed with the idea of calling it version 2.0; it’s that big.

Geotagging

The “marquee” new feature is built-in geotagging. When you open a trail, you can see any editable pictures that were taken around the same time. Pins show where the trail indicates your pictures were taken. You can then select the images you want to tag and add the location to them. The location can either be the nearest “real” location — i.e., an actual recorded track point — or CameraGPS can interpolate between the two nearest points.

Export trail

Of course if you want to continue to use your favourite geotagging app you can. Version 1.2 includes support for the new “extensions” that Apple introduced with iOS 8, allowing you to export your GPS trails to any supported cloud service. Of course, Box and Dropbox are still supported. We’ve also tested exporting to Google Drive and iCloud Drive. All you need to do it install the services app.

Note: You’ll need the latest version of the Box app (3.5.2 at the time of writing) for it to work reliably with that service.

In addition to all that, there’s a host of smaller changes and improvements. Some of the more visible include the “Low battery” notifications now include the ability to stop recording without opening the app and support for the latest Apple devices (iPhone 6 and 6+ screen sizes, 64-bit builds). Of course there are always minor tweaks and fixes.

A lot of work has gone into this release and we hope you like it. It’s a free update for existing users and the same bargain price for everyone else. It’s currently with Apple for review and hopefully we be out soon.

Tags cameragps, geotagging, new, update

news

CameraGPS 1.2 Preview

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date December 1, 2014

After the bad news about www.cut, I thought I should post some good news. And here we have a quick video — the one that will be the basis of the App Preview when it’s available on the App Store — showing off some of the features of the new version of CameraGPS, our geotagging app.

CameraGPS has had substantial changes to take advantage of the new facilities in iOS 8, so much so that it is now iOS 8-only. (The vast majority of users are currently running the latest version of the operating system. If you’ve not updated yet — please do! It’s worth it.) We’ve included everything from the new interactive notifications right through to the ability to geotag your images right inside the app.

Hopefully it should be available before new the New Year. It will be a free upgrade for existing users.

Tags geotagging, new, update, version

news

www.cut 3.3 update

Post author By wandlesoftware
Post date November 27, 2014

In September I said that the iOS 8 update for www.cut would probably be out towards the end of the month. I wanted to update you on why that has not happened yet.

I did finish what I thought would be a decent update, complete with an action extension, but Apple rejected it when I submitted it for review. Their objection was for something completely unrelated to what had changed since 3.2.

At this stage I’m not clear what the path forward is. I do not want to end support for it — it’s an app that I still use myself — but it’s difficult to justify the magnitude of change they’re asking for at the the moment.

So I’m afraid I don’t have an answer right now but thought I should document what the hold-up is. More information when I have it.