Categories
news

Quick Calendar 1.0.1

When I first download macOS 10.12 Sierra I noticed that Quick Calendar looked a little out of place. While all of Apple’s Notification Centre widgets had a light theme, Quick Calendar had a dark title bar and looked much more like things did in Yosemite and El Capitan.

I re-build the widget for Sierra. No change. I looked in the documentation for style and theme changes. Nothing. I thought, perhaps, that Apple had kept the light theme for themselves. Luckily I was wrong.

And this new version of Quick Calendar has that tiny update so that it looks at home on macOS Sierra. It still works on El Capitan and Yosemite.

I just submitted it to Apple. It should be available to download in a few days hours. Enjoy.

Update: It was approved last night, less the six hours after I submitted it!

Categories
news

ShareEverywhere 1.1.3

Readability have decided to retire their “read later” service, which means that the time has come to remove it from ShareEverywhere, too.

This release also removes the error checking when saving a link to Delicious. You’d be right to think that’s an odd thing to do, but it’s down to the way that the Delicious API works. Or rather, doesn’t work. From our testing, the “add bookmark” API seems to work correctly but always returns an error. Sadly, this means there’s no way to distinguish between a genuine error and no error.

So not an earth shattering release, but definitely an improvement. We hope you like it.

Categories
news

Rootn Tootn 2.2

This update has been a long time in coming and doesn’t contain anything like the feature-set originally envisaged — the story behind this may be revealed eventually — but what’s about to hit the App Store shortly is nice.

Rather than a long list of new features, it mostly makes existing features either easier to find or easier to understand.

For example, some users found the difference between a duration timer and an event time to be confusing. And, honestly, we can’t blame them. While the best names we’ve been able to come up with, they’re not necessarily immediately obvious. So rather than just say “do you want duration or event,” the new reminder screen now has some explanatory text.

We’ve extended this kind of thinking throughout the app. So it’s not a flashy new release, it doesn’t have a tonne of exciting new features, but we think there’s a lot of value in allowing new users to find the current functionality more easily.

Categories
news

Readability

Today I received an email:

After more than five years of operation, the Readability article bookmarking/read-it-later service will be shutting down after September 30, 2016.

Currently, ShareEverywhere supports the ability to post links to Readability, so we will shortly be issuing a release that removes support.

It feels like every blog these days is about functionality that’s being removed! We hope to have better news soon!

Categories
news

Yummy 3.2.2

A new version of Yummy is on the way to the App Store.

Sadly, this version removes support for syncing with Delicious.com. The Delicious API has been broken since March so it feels dishonest to claim support when we’re not able to. I apologise if you’re affected by this change but I’m afraid it’s outside our control. Please contact Delicious if you would like to bring back this functionality.

Categories
trivia

WWDC 2016

Quick Calendar on Sierra
Quick Calendar on Sierra

I normally have a few words to say about the announcements that Apple makes at their annual developer conference, and this year is no exception.

The features of iOS 10 are (broadly) not hugely relevant to our current apps. It’s not possible for any of our apps to integrate with Siri; none really lend themselves to plugging into Messages. I feel that CameraGPS probably works best as a separate app rather than trying to plug into Maps (and I’m not even sure it would be possible).

But there are opportunities for new apps that — time permitting — may see the light of day. Watch this space.

At the time of writing, it’s my intention to make sure that all our apps continue to work on iOS 10. This is a much bigger update for CameraGPS than the others, as it relies on a feature that has been deprecated.

Having said that, from a user perspective it seems to be a nice release. Even the first beta is relatively stable, though not good enough (in my opinion) for your main phone.

The story is similar on macOS Sierra. Quick Calendar runs just fine on the first beta build (though I might need to tweak some of the colours!). It looks and works pretty much the same as El Capitan, which I mean as a compliment. I’m not sure how much I’ll use Siri. I think I’d be embarrassed to use it in a crowded office!

So, overall, Apple’s announcements don’t change very much for Wandle Software’s apps. But they still look to be good releases! Keep an eye out for the final versions in September!

Categories
news

The future of Yummy

Back in March I wrote about a Delicious API outage. I assumed that it was a short term problem caused by them moving web hosts. But it’s now July and the service is still not back, meaning that users of Yummy and other third party clients still see no error and no bookmarks. (Actually, it’s worse than that: half the web site seems to be broken, with dead images and links abound. I think the whole endeavour is over.)

At this point I see no point in maintaining Delicious support in Yummy. When you consider that the app is named after the site this feels a little crazy but pretending that Yummy supports Delicious when it can’t is starting to feel dishonest, even though this is not a problem of my making.

Because of this, I will shortly be sending an update to Apple that disables Delicious support. After this, it will only sync with Pinboard.in.

Categories
support

Delicious API Broken

Sadly, Delicious seem to have broken their API when they recently updated their website. This affects all third-party clients including Yummy.

Without getting too technical, every API call tells Yummy that you have no bookmarks. This is why you don’t see any error message. This is also why there is no workaround that I can recommend you make nor any code changes that I can do to help.

Unfortunately this is entirely for Delicious to solve.

I will update if there are any developments.

Categories
news

Yummy 3.2.1

Yummy 3.2.1A new version of Yummy is on its way to the App Store and it features the following new features:

  • Thumbnails for your bookmarks
  • Help managing link rot

Both of these features are only present in the “pro” version (you can upgrade with an in-app purchase) on iPhones, iPads or iPod touches running iOS 9.2 or higher.

Thumbnails

The thumbnails rely on an internal (non-Spotlight) index of all your bookmarks. It may take a while for all of them to be fully indexed if you have a lot. Normally the refresh process takes place after each sync, updating a few bookmarks each time (starting with the newest to the oldest).

Websites will need to support the OpenGraph standard for defining thumbnail images for them to appear. This is something that we hope to expand in future versions of Yummy, but this will always be dependent on the pages you bookmark to some extent.

Once a bookmark has been indexed, the thumbnail will automatically appear both in the bookmark view and in Spotlight searches.

Bookmark filterLink rot

Over time, the bookmarks that you save become out of date, redirecting away to another page or just pointing to nothing — the famous “404 Not Found” error. Yummy can’t stop that process but it can help you find the affected bookmarks more easily.

It relies on the same indexing process used by to find the thumbnails. The HTTP status is shown in the bookmark list view and also in the edit bookmark screen (where it also show the “official” name for the code, in case you can’t remember what, say, a 503 is).

You can also filter by status code using the “Filter” menu introduced in Yummy 3.1. It’s split into three categories, broadly everything is okay (200 and above), permission denied (400 and above) and server error (500 and above).

We hope you like it…

If you’re thinking that these are pretty big updates for a point release, you’d be right. These have been ready to go since before iOS 9 launched. Unfortunately there was a bug in iOS 9 prior to version 9.2 that caused 64-bit iPhones and iPads to restart. (That is, it wasn’t Yummy that crashed but the whole phone. This is called a kernel panic.) We’re really happy to be able to release these new features but sorry it took so long. We hope you like it.

Categories
news

www.cut 3.3.1

I just submitted a minor update to www.cut that improves its iOS 9 support.

It now works with side-by-side multi-tasking and fills the screen of an iPad Pro (I say fills rather than uses as it’s hard to make a couple of text boxes and three buttons to use a 12″ screen!).

Apple have been taking about a week to approve updates, so fingers crossed. (However, it’s only fair to note that it took several attempts to get 3.3 on the App Store.)