Category: howto

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faq howto trivia

Spot the Difference

One question that I realised that I have not answered very clearly yet is, What’s the difference between Yummy and Yummy Browser? That’s what I hope to answer here.

Perhaps obvious, but worth repeating anyway, is that Yummy Browser is the “lite” version of Yummy. The practical upshot being that every feature in Yummy Browser is also in Yummy.

The name indicates the main difference between the two versions. Yummy Browser allows you to browse your Delicious.com bookmarks. That is, you can:

  • View your bookmarks by date

  • View your bookmarks by tag

You can also view all your meta-data, including the notes field, the date added and the public/private status. Of course there’s no point in just viewing them, so you can also open bookmarks in Safari or send them to Mail so you can send them to your friends.

Yummy Browser is built from exactly the same code as the full version and is, similarly, capable of handling thousands of bookmarks.

The full version of Yummy has a number of great extra features which can be summarised as follows:

  • Full editing support. You can add, edit and delete bookmarks directly on your iPhone

  • Search for bookmarks by tag(s) or keywords in the title or notes fields

  • Built-in web preview so you don’t need to switch over to Safari

  • Send bookmarks to Twitter

If you’re a heavy user of Delicious on the move, I think you’ll agree that these extra features are well worth getting. And it’s always nice to know that you can get a feel for Yummy for free.

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faq howto support

Editing Tags

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.

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faq howto support tutorial

Memory Warning

By now many of you (assuming you own Yummy!) will have seen the above warning message. Why are you getting it and what does it really mean? That’s what this post hopes to answer.

The first thing to note is that the error message is being completely honest. The iPhone has told Yummy that it is running out of memory and that if nothing changes it will be shutdown without warning.

Does that not mean that Yummy is being incredibly wasteful? How could it possibly be using 8Gb of memory just to display a webpage? The answer to that is, it’s not that memory that is being depleted. In order to run programs the iPhone has around 128Mb of memory, less than 30Mb of which is available to third-party applications like Yummy. The number on the box, the 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb sizes, are a different “pot” that cannot be used for the same purpose.

So, the first thing that Yummy does when it starts running out of memory is to “forget” about as much stuff as possible that it doesn’t currently need. This means that the number of bookmarks in your Delicious account has little bearing on how much memory is used.

Jettisoning this temporary data is typically enough to allow the webpage to load. However if you’re loading a particularly large or complicated page it might not be and, unfortunately, Yummy often does not get a second warning before being forced out.

This is one of those rare cases where I’ve had to let some of the underlying technical details show through. It’s not ideal but I thought it better that you know what’s going on rather than just allow it to exit without warning.

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faq howto tutorial

Sending bookmarks to Twitter

The funny thing about sending bookmarks from Delicious to Twitter is that I did this entirely for myself. I never saw any demand for it until after I’d added it! Now I see lots of people wanting to do exactly that and it was a popular feature with beta testers. So here’s what it looks like:

It’s simply a matter of selecting the option from the “action” menu found in both the bookmark view and and web preview screens.

This is a screen-shot from my phone and hence shows my current favourite Twitter client, TwitterFon. If you prefer Twitterrific or Tweetie, though, you’re also in luck.

First go to the setting screen:

And then select the program you want to use for posting to Twitter:

Just below the “Twitter Client” setting is one called “Shorten URL.” This allows you to shorten the URL using is.gd before sending to Twitter.

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faq howto support tutorial

Yummy Settings

The functionality of Yummy that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks has pretty much been what you get “out of the box.” There is, however, an increasingly large number of switches and options in the Settings application that you can set to customise Yummy to work just the way you like.

You Delicious.com credentials are typically set when you launch Yummy for the first time. If you want to change to a different user or you’ve changed your password, this is where you change it.

Share new posts. Are new bookmarks public or private by default?

Refresh on startup. By default Yummy with try to synchronise your bookmarks as soon as you start. If you don’t change your bookmarks very often or have a lot of bookmarks and it takes a while to refresh, you may prefer to sync manually.

Remember last screen. If this option is set to ON Yummy will start in the same mode you were using last time you had it open. (Yes, in version 2.0 there’s a typo. This will be fixed in the next version.)

Shake to refresh. A fun option suggested by a user. Rather than having to press the Refresh button in the menu screen, you can simply shake your iPhone or iPod touch to initiate a full sync.

Twitter Client. Many Yummy users also regularly use Twitter. This option allows you to send bookmarks to your favourite Twitter client,

Shorten URL. If enabled, Yummy will shorten the URL using is.gd before sending to Twitter. This option is not used when sending links to Safari or Mail.

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faq howto support tutorial

Web Preview

A popular request from users of version 1.0 if Yummy was a built-in web page viewer. I was more than happy to oblige.

The “action” menu at the bottom right is exactly the same as that found in the post view screen, with the same functionality and operation.

While mainly designed to view your bookmarks, it’s not unusual to venture off the well trodden path occasionally. If you find a page you want to bookmark as well, you can add it to Delicious using the “add” button which you’ll find to the left of the action button.

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faq howto support tutorial

Bookmarks

All the information that delicious.com holds about your bookmarks are available in Yummy, whether you are on- or off-line.

Of course there’s no point in just looking at your bookmarks! You want to do something with them. The first option is hinted at by the arrow to the right of the URL. This opens the web preview. I’ll be talking about that a little more tomorrow.

There are further options that you can find by pressing the “Action” button in the bottom right of the screen:

The two options that are always available are open the link in Safari and send it to Mail. You can also configure Yummy to send the bookmark (optionally shortened using is.gd) to Twitter. More about that in a couple of days.

You can also edit any bookmark by pressing the “Edit” button in the top right of the screen. Unlike in Yummy version one, all editing, with the exception of the date field, is performed directly in this screen without flipping to an edit only screen.

An “add bookmark” screen looks very similar (see above) but the operation is exactly the same. You can add new bookmarks by pressing the “add” button that you’ll find in most Yummy screens. As with version one, the bookmarklet is also available when you’re in Safari. The instructions for adding it are exactly the same as before.

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faq howto support tutorial

Searching for Bookmarks

Searching has always been a big feature of Yummy and has been revamped and improved for version two.

For starters, the screen looks different:

Note how that here we have searched for bookmarks that have both the “iphone” and “development” tag. A similar trick applies when you search by title and notes fields: it searches for all words but not necessarily in any given order. For example searching for “hello world” would find both “Hello there, world” and “World says Hello.”

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faq howto support tutorial

View by Tag

Brand new in Yummy 2.0 is the ability to browse through your bookmarks by tag. You could already search for them but a number of users indicated that a screen like this would be very useful:

From here you can drill down to get a list of bookmarks.

One neat touch here (if I do say so myself) is that pressing “Add” button pre-populates the tags field with the current tag, so in this case the “Add bookmark” screen would have “iphone” in the tag field.

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faq howto support

View by Date

Users of Yummy version 1.0 will find this screen the most familiar as it was the default. Nevertheless you will find some changes here.

Rather than have a section heading for every date, the granularity changes as you head back in time. You get a heading for every day of the last week, one for the whole of the week before that, and then fewer and fewer headings as you head even further back in time. You can get to every one of your bookmarks this way but it’s probably easier to search if it’s an old one.

These other methods of finding your old bookmarks will be covered in the next couple of days.