Category: faq

I just found this review in the US App Store:

A couple of things about this.

Firstly, if you experience problems with Yummy, please let me know. If I don’t know about an issue I can’t fix it. Leaving a review doesn’t work terribly well, either, as there is no way for me to respond. There is a support link in iTunes, here on this web site and in the “About” screen of the application itself.

But what about this reported issue? I can’t be sure but I think that this user signed into Yummy using their Yahoo! ID but all their bookmarks are in an account protected by a normal Delicious.com password. Normally this should give an error message, however if you sign into an account with no bookmarks then it will probably appear to “hang.” (This is a bug and I’ll try to fix in a subsequent version. Obviously this doesn’t affect most users.)

On the other hand, if there is genuinely a “timed out” error message then it’s down to either the network or at the Delicous.com end. These are not components that I have any control over I’m afraid, so all I can suggest is that you try using a WiFi connection rather than 3G. I do all of my testing on a first generation iPhone, which has a 2G data connection and less memory than most newer handsets so I know for sure that Yummy works even on a slow network!

In general, if you’re not sure which authentication method to use I would suggest you try Delicious.com first as it’s much less hassle if it’s not the right one.

Yummy has been able to share your bookmarks in various ways since version 1.0. Yummy 2.4 adds a new way: share with your Facebook contacts.

First you have to log in. You should be able to find this without too much trouble: it’s right on the main menu screen, just above the “Log out from Delicious.com” option. When you select the menu item you should get a screen that looks like this:

As the text suggests, just enter your Facebook login credentials. Yummy will remember them for future reference.

And then next time you’re looking at a bookmark that you want to share, simply press the “link” icon and select “Send to Facebook” option. You’ll then get a screen like the above, which shows a simulation of what the link will look like. Enter a status message if you like and press “Publish” when you like what you see.

An entirely new feature that you should easily be able to find in the main menu is the ability to view your Tag Bundles.

A Tag Bundle is a collection of tags, and drilling down shows a list of all the bookmarks that have any of the tags in it. If you have a lot of tags in one bundle or many tags in total it may take a second or two to produce the list but it will work eventually.

Like the Web Preview screen that I talked about yesterday, the Tag Editing screen is one that has existed for a while but sees a significant update in version 2.4.

Rather than just allowing you to select from your own tags, Yummy now goes back to Delicious.com and asks for recommended and popular tags for the link in question.

As you an see in the screen shot, it also shows your network, allowing you to share your bookmarks with other Delicious users.

I can tell what you’re thinking. Yes, Yummy has been able to send links to Twitter for over a year. Since version 2.0 the “Send to Twitter” button has closed down Yummy and opened one of a long list of Twitter clients.

While that option is still present, Yummy 2.4 includes a much better option: a built-in Twitter client. If you’re just sharing a link it means that you don’t have to exit Yummy which makes the whole process that little bit quicker and more convenient.

So how do you get it?

Easy.

First go to the Settings screen, either the one from the main menu or the one in the Settings app:

Change the Twitter Client option to “Built-in.” It’s the first option after “None.”

Next go to a link that you want to send to Twitter and press the “Link” icon in the toolbar.  Press the “Send to Twitter” button.

Now comes the slightly annoying bit.

Press the “Login” button. Yummy will now (after a prompt) quit and take you over to Safari. Here you should log into Twitter as instructed and copy the PIN code to the clipboard.

(The irony of having a system to avoid having to exit an application requiring the user to exit when setting it up is not lost on me. I’m hoping to improve this in a subsequent version.)

On relaunching Yummy you should see the following screen:

Do as instructed and you’re ready to go. Yummy will have remembered your link (so you can publish straight away). You only need to go through this Yummy-Safari-Yummy trip once.

One of the constant battles you come across when developing an iPhone application is that between limited screen space and the desire to make new features obvious and easy to find. The ability to edit tags is clearly an area where I saved screen real-estate at the expense of making it discoverable.

I refer here to a suggestion added on the Yummy Uservoice page:

The other suggestion of auto fill all tags from a bookmark that others have added would be good too, although that would require a network lookup.

Actually this feature has been present since version 2.1! I consider it a failing on my part that users who are enthusiastic enough to send me feedback have been unable to find this feature themselves. I hope to make this easier to find and use in the next version.

But until the next release is available in iTunes the current mechanism is the only way to go. Here’s how it works.

First, open the bookmark screen. You need to be adding or editing a bookmark for the button to be enabled. In this screen shot I am adding a new bookmark. Note that the “bookmark” icon at the bottom of the screen is now enabled.

Press this and the Tags field will now be populated with the suggested tags for this bookmark. If you’ve already added some tags then the new ones will be merged, so don’t worry, you won’t lose any edits.

If you followed the link to look at the suggestion, you’ll see that the quote above was the second part. Here’s the first half:

As you are entering new tags, auto lookup of tags I’ve used before. Say I have already used the tag “iPod-touch”, as I type “ip…” it would display all tags starting with “ip”.

I would love to be able to do this. There are, however, two stumbling blocks. The first is entirely my problem: performance. Some users have thousands of tags and making this work without being painfully slow would be hard. But the main difficulty is with the user interface.

Look at the screen above. Where could you put those suggested tags? When you remember that I also need to leave space for the keyboard, there really isn’t very much space! In the olden days, back in release 1.0 of Yummy, you used to edit tags on a different screen. This would have given enough space to add a list of suggestions, but a few users complained that moving to a new screen was unnecessary and slowed things down. I agreed with this (even though that’s how Apple’s Contacts application works) and fixed it in version 2.0.

This is all to say that this is a feature that I am actively thinking about but is not one that you should expect to see imminently. If you have any suggestions of how you think this could be made to work, then I’m all ears.