Categories
howto news

In brief

A couple of quick things that I thought might be worth making more public. (I’ve already tweeted about both of these issues.)

First, if you’re experiencing “The certificate for this server is invalid” errors, this is because Yahoo! have not fully updated all their servers with a new SSL certificate. They said that they fixed this yesterday but I still see the problem myself (though, funnily enough, I wasn’t getting it yesterday).

I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do here. We will just have to wait until Yahoo! finish updating their servers.  There’s a thread on their support forums if you’d like to keep an eye on progress.

Secondly, if you follow any of the Apple or iPhone press, even some of the mainstream media, you will probably have seen that a company is threatening to sue developers of some iOS software over some patents. As a precaution I have remove Yummy Browser and www.cut from sale in the US App Store. The full version of Yummy is still available world-wide.

I’ll have them back in the App Store as soon as the situation has been resolved.

Categories
howto news

YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious

“Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.”

It’s early days yet, so no-one outside Yahoo and the YouTube guys knows exactly what’s going to happen, but I think the signs for Delicious are largely positive.

In the short term, they are asking users with Delicious accounts linked to their Yahoo! ID to convert them back to normal Delicious.com accounts. Of course Yummy has always supported this type of authentication. Indeed, since 2.6 access in this way is actually both quicker and more reliable than using a Yahoo! ID protected account.

I immediately converted my account over to see what happens. And the short answer, from the Yummy side, is nothing. Everything continues to work as normal.

At some point it will probably require you to log in again. There’s a small bug here. When you log out and back into the same account again, Yummy will show no bookmarks. Don’t worry, your bookmarks are still there. Just add a new bookmark or (from the Delicious.com website) edit one of your existing links and Yummy will synchronise correctly. This will be fixed in the next version.

Categories
faq howto news support

Yummy 2.6: Bookmark editing

I discussed the new bookmark view yesterday. Today I’d like to talk about the new editing view.

In the past I’ve heard a few complaints about this screen. Firstly, the navigation was a little… quirky. Secondly, there just wasn’t enough space to add as many tags as people wanted. Thirdly, you had to type in all the tags. A few versions ago I added a way to pick from your existing tags and, while most people agreed that it was useful, many wished for something more like in the Mail app. And finally, I got complaints that you had to manually enter the bookmark title.

In Yummy 2.6 I present a completely new editing screen.

I think it’s fair to say that all these suggestions have been addressed.
Rather than try to squeeze everything onto one screen as happened with the previous version, Yummy 2.6 now places each of the major fields in separate tabs. This leaves plenty of space to enter your notes, tags and a title.
It also allowed me to address the other requests. For a long time it’s been possible to get Yummy to find the title of a web page, but a number of people never found it. The extra space means that there’s a big button above the tab bar and below the text box.
For entering tags, as you can see in the screen shot, Yummy will suggest the top four tags starting with the letters you’ve started typing. When there are three or fewer suggestions, the right-most button takes you to the edit screen, much as it did in the previous versions. One “glitch” you may notice is that long tags flow over the bounds of each button. This does, I’ll concede, look a little messy but by truncating each tag it would make it difficult to distinguish between some longer words. I felt that being useful trumped being pretty.
Categories
faq howto news

Yummy 2.6: List View

On the iPhone you are very much limited by screen space. You can’t always see the full bookmark name. There’s not really enough space to show the name, the URL, the tags and the description. And worse, for me, the last solution I had to this wasn’t popular. I thought scrolling the titles was a neat way around this limitation; I think I was about the only person who liked it.

Trying to take all of this on board, Yummy 2.6 changes the list view to look like this:

If you want to see the full title, simply press and hold. The title will be shown just above your finger or at the very bottom of the screen if it won’t fit above it. (There’s another blog post coming to explain why I did it this way.)

By default, Yummy still displays the URL below the title. If you go to the settings you can change this to the tags or notes field. You can also swipe left or right on an individual bookmark in the list to cycle through the three options.

These two features are only available on iOS 3.2 and above.

Categories
howto news support

Improved Yahoo! ID login in Yummy 2.5

Remember the bad old days? When you used your Yahoo! ID to log into Yummy you had to leave the app, go into Safari, remember a number… Well, it wasn’t really that hard but there were more steps than I wanted. 
Yummy 2.5 changes that.

Now you never have to leave Yummy how ever you log into Delicious. This behaviour is actually contrary to the OAuth spec but the user experience is so much better and simpler I thought that it was worth breaking some rules.

Yahoo! do not serve a mobile-optimised web site so it requires a little scrolling around, but I still think that this is more convenient that switching over to Safari and back again. Of course, this works better on the iPad, which has a much bigger screen.

Categories
howto news

Why the “experimental” label for Pinboard.in support in Yummy 2.5?

You might have noticed that the new version of Yummy has support for the pinboard.in bookmarking website for introverts, but that I’ve flagged the feature as “experimental.” why would I add a new feature and yet suggest that you might not want to use it? That’s what I hope to explain in this post. 
Implementing support for pinboard.in was pretty easy. They use mostly the same API (way of talking to the server) as Delicious so it was just a matter of changing a few links and adding an option to the log in screen. 
The devil, however, is in the word “mostly.” The Delicious.com API is, bizarrely, not great for syncing your bookmarks, especially on devices with limited memory like an iPhone. The pinboard.in guys agree, which is why they didn’t implement the few concessions that Delicious made to allow syncing. 
What this means is that, technically, Yummy never syncs with pinboard.in, instead it downloads all your bookmarks every time. Also, it’s not possible to download bookmarks in “batches” which means that the more links you have the more likely it is to fail. (There is also a limit with Delicious but I’ve never heard of anyone reaching it.) Unfortunately it’s these “packrats,” with huge numbers of links, who are drawn to pinboard.in’s service. 
Having said all that, I still thought that it was a feature worth adding. There is some demand and I don’t know what the limit is; hopefully it’s high enough to be useful. 
So, what does “experimental” mean? In short it says that I have not fully decided what to do with it. If I get a disproportionate amount if support requests I may remove it. If successful I may create a separate app. 
But if you do use it, please let me know how you get on. 
Categories
howto support tutorial

Pinboard.in Support in Yummy 2.5

Yummy 2.5 adds support for the social bookmarking site for introverts, pinboard.in. It is, however, disabled by default, so today I want to talk about how to enable it.
The first step is — obviously — to enable it. You can open the Settings app or use the settings option from Yummy’s main screen. Either way you should see something like the screen below.

Flip the switch at the bottom of the screen to “On.”

You’ll note that it’s flagged as “Experimental.” I’ll explain more tomorrow about that and what that means for future updates, but it short it’s no more likely to eat all your bookmarks or do anything else nasty than the interface with Delicious.com.

Once support has been enabled the log in screen — accessed either by logging out from Delicious or launching the app — should now have a pinboard.in option.

The rest is exactly the same as when you’re logging into a normal non-Yahoo! ID Delicious.com account.

There is one caveat to this. If you don’t have a Delicious.com account and you want to log into a pinboard.in account on first launch you may find that the option you see in the screen above is missing. This is a bug that will be fixed in Yummy 2.5.1 but there is a work around: after you’ve changed the settings, try killing Yummy from the task switching menu (double-tap home, press and hold Yummy, press the “jiggling” icon).  You should find the option available next time you launch Yummy.

Categories
faq howto support

Reporting problems

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.

Categories
faq howto support

Yummy 2.4 new feature: Post to Facebook

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.
Categories
faq howto support

Yummy 2.4 new feature: View Tag Bundles

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.