Categories
howto tutorial

Not Synchronised?

Occasionally Yummy will get out of sync with how Delicious sees the world. Usually pressing the “Refresh” button in the bottom left of the screen will bring things up to date. If there are a lot of changes you may want to check that you’re on a WiFi connection rather than a mobile network, but either should work.

Read on if this does not work.

The first thing you should do is not keep pressing refresh. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but sometimes the clock on your handset and those on the Delicious servers are in not sync meaning that Yummy does not think that there are any changes worth downloading. If you wait a while and try again it often works.

The next trick is to change a bookmark. Any bookmark, it doesn’t matter. Maybe add some new text to one, add a new tag, change the post from public to private (and back again). You can do this either using Yummy or on the Delicious.com website. When the change is complete, try pressing the Refresh button again.

I’ve never come across a synchronisation problem in a release version of Yummy that one of these two solutions has not fixed. If you’re not so lucky, the final step is to delete Yummy from your iPhone by pressing and holding the Yummy icon on the home screen. Once the icons all start wobbling, press the ‘X’ floating to the top-right of the Yummy icon and confirm you want to remove the application and all its data. Next time you sync with iTunes you’ll get a clean, new copy with an empty database.

If this doesn’t work, please let me know.

Categories
howto news

New feature: Mail Link

In addition to all the little details that you don’t see behind the scenes, I managed to include one visible change to the recent 1.0.2 release of Yummy: the ability to mail links. This was a very popular request, so I hope you find it useful.

Simply find the link you want to mail by browsing or searching for it, open the bookmark and press the “Mail Link” button. Mail will open with the subject line populated and the URL in the body of the message,

Categories
news support

MyPhoneApps Forum

Recently Yummy has been added MyPhoneApps Forum, a web site dedicated to iPhone and iPod touch applications.

The main threads of interest to owners (or potential owners) of Yummy are as follows:

These threads are dedicated to Yummy. Of course the site has a similar set up for lots of other applications. Hopefully it will be a great resource for all iPhone developers and users and I’m happy to be an early supporter of it.

I hope you’ll never need to post in the bug reports thread, but it’s there if you do find something! I’ll be as active as I can be, answering questions and keeping an eye out for your great feedback.

Categories
news

Yummy Version 1.0.2

A minor update to Yummy will hopefully be available for download in the next few days. It has the following changes:

  • Fix crash on start up bug that was affecting a small number of users

  • Works with a much larger number of bookmarks

  • Improved compatibility with version 2.1 of the iPhone OS

  • Mail bookmarks as well as view them in Safari

  • Bug fixes

It should be a seamless upgrade from the previous version, although the initial refresh may take a little longer this time.

Please let me know how you get on.

Categories
howto tutorial

Search by Title

One little feature that I probably should have made more of a fuss over when I added it in release 1.0.1 is the ability to search your posts by title. This was a popular request so I was very happy to include it. Of course Yummy has had the ability to search for one or more tags since its initial release.

Categories
trivia

Artwork

One of the finishing touches of any application is its art work. In the case of Yummy little more than an icon was required but, as a developer rather than a graphic designer, this proved to be much harder than I originally expected. Here’s how it happened.

Playing free word association I tried to find concepts that included aspects of both Delicious.com and Yummy. Delicious branding is basically just four quadrants in different colours. Not terribly limiting.

More limiting was the size, which Apple tells me is fifty seven square pixels. (Still, I remember from my days on the Sinclair Spectum which had entire characters made from an 8×8 monochrome grid.) I settled on a muffin or cup cake as my “yummy” concept and the Delicious colours. My first attempt looked like this:

I’d be the first to admit to the limits of my design skills. However, even setting my technique aside there are problems. It’s a bit too fussy; too many details in too small a space. Additionally, the iPhone adds a “shine” to icons and adds a border with curved edges. It didn’t look great on-screen and looked even worse on my iPhone.

I decided to focus on a single cup-cake and use the Delicious colours as a back-drop. I grew quite attached to my second attempt which I can’t show you. I made the mistake of using clip-art that was really designed for PowerPoint and not distribution in software. The licence agreement was not clear, but it looked as though they wanted to claim copyright on the whole “derived item” and claim an absurd royalty rate.

Anyway, long story short, I emailed them at six of their email addresses to clarify terms. Five addresses bounced, the final message got through but was ignored. Not great customer service.

But in a sense I lucked out. My wife put together the logo you see now, which not only do I prefer but is entirely original and royalty-free.

Categories
news support

Reviews

One nice thing about Apple’s AppStore is that users can review their downloads. One of the disadvantages is that the reviews only appear on the store of the user, which means that I can only really see reviews posted in the UK.

[Update: I have been reminded that you can see reviews without being logged in. Still, switching to each of the countries where there’s an App Store and looking for reviews would quickly get tedious.]

But there are other ways. Thanks to Erica Sadun’s excellent AppStore Review Scraper I’ve been able to look at what’s happening everywhere.

Many thanks to the people that wrote good things about Yummy. It is greatly appreciated.

However in this post I really want to concentrate on people who have not had such a positive experience. As long as it’s fair and true I have no problem with people posting bad reviews. What’s interesting is that both reviews (on the US store) report what sounds like the same problem — it saying “Loading data” on startup and then crashes — and yet neither user reported the problem to me directly. Unfortunately I can’t fix bugs that I don’t know about.

Luckily I do have one set of crash logs. It would seem that the recent iPhone 2.1 release leaves applications with less memory than before, meaning that users with a lot of bookmarks can have problems. I am working on the assumption that all three bugs have the same root cause and am currently in the process of putting together a new release.

This should be complete in the next day or two and will be on your iPhone as soon as Apple have reviewed it.

Categories
news support

Yummy Version 1.0.1

A minor update to Yummy will hopefully be available for download in the next few days. It has the following changes:

  • Search by title

  • Fix to allow “unusual” URLs

  • Cosmetic changes

Categories
faq support

Help!

In the wild there are millions of iPhone and iPod touches and billions of web pages. While I’ve worked hard to test Yummy on as many handsets and with as many bookmarks as possible, it’s just not possible to try out every combination. So while most people who download Yummy find that it Just Works, there’s a small chance that it doesn’t work the way you expect or returns you to the home screen without any warning.

Of course I will do what I can to help.

Whatever happened, I will be more able to help if you can provide me with a succinct and precise description of it. Details are good — but don’t send me passwords!

If it crashed — returned you to the home screen — I will find your crash logs and bookmarks very helpful.

After you’ve synced with iTunes the crash logs should be in one of the following folders:

On Mac OS X they are located in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice.

Windows XP: C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataApple computerLogsCrashReporter/

Windows Vista: C:UsersAppDataRoamingApple computerLogsCrashReporter/MobileDevice/

Secondly, it would be an enormous help if you could send me an export/backup of your bookmarks. (Settings in the top right of the delicious web page and then “Export” in the Bookmarks section.) Of course I would understand if you wanted to keep them private.

You can then email me (support at yummyapp dot com) with the details.

One final note: unfortunately even if I identify the problem I can’t send you a fix immediately. Everything has to go through Apple and they are currently taking about a week to approve new applications. I will offer a work-around if possible.

Categories
faq

Frequently Anticipated Questions

Yummy has only been available on the App Store for a couple of days now so I’ve not got a lot of feedback about it yet. However I have seen comments posted about other applications and so thought I would pre-empt your questions with this post. Feel free to ask further questions in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.

What happens if I add a new bookmark when I’m offline?

It goes without saying that accessing your bookmarks without being online is going to be somewhat limiting. Having said that, Yummy goes to some lengths to make sure that none of your edits go missing. If you lose connectivity, it will queue up all your changes and send them to Delicious.com when you’re next online.

Can I get an evaluation copy?

Unfortunately Apple does not allow this possibility in their App Store. There is no other way to distribute iPhone applications on a large scale.