Wandle SoftwareThere’s not a lot to say about the menu screen in the new version of Yummy.
From here you can select how you want to find your bookmarks. Using the toolbar at the bottom you can also force a refresh (useful mainly if you’ve disabled the automatic refresh on startup option) or add a new bookmark. We’ll cover all the various options in the next week or two.
In Yummy 1.0, one thing that caught a number of users out the first time they started Yummy was where to enter their Delicious.com username and password. The Apple convention of keeping settings in the Settings application seems not to have filtered into many iPhone and iPod touch users’ consciousness.
Version 2 makes this whole experience much easier. New users (and everyone upgrading) will see the following screen the first time they run it:
Once you enter your username and password, Yummy will check that they’re valid (so you need network connectivity when you do it) and immediately start to download all your bookmarks. This may take a while if you have a lot of bookmarks, and using WiFi rather than the cell network is not a bad idea. It’s best to wait until they’re all downloaded before exiting but nothing will break if you don’t. You can use Yummy while it’s downloading, so don’t feel that you have a sit and wait, staring at the status bar.
Talking of the “status bar,” the home screen and status bar will be the subject of the next post. Stay tuned.
I am aware that a number of users find the process of adding the “Add to Yummy” bookmarklet to Safari to be harder than it should be. As I discussed last week, this is not something that I can make a lot simpler — you’ll have to ask Apple to help me there.
But if adding the bookmarklet in Safari or Internet Explorer on your PC and syncing your iPhone is not something that appeals, try this:
Click this link:
(It should redirect you back to this page.)
Then add it to Safari using the “+” button at the bottom of the screen and press “Add Bookmark.”
You can change the name of the bookmark if you like, then click ‘Save.’
Now click the bookmarks button. Locate your new bookmark, press the “Edit” button at the bottom of the screen and select the new bookmark.
You must change the URL itself. You need to delete everything before (and including) the first question mark, making the first word “javascript”. When you’re done, the screen should look something like this:
And with that you’re good to go.
I see that a new version of the iPhone firmware is now available for download. Unfortunately not all developers get to see new releases before you do, so I have not had the chance to check that everything still works as before. I do not anticipate any issues but will have a look as soon as I can.
If you see any problems please let me know. I will do what I can to help.
From time to time users of Yummy ask me how often it synchronises its bookmarks with Delicious.com. I hope to answer that question in this post.
First a quick aside. How did I envisage people using Yummy when I was designing it? The idea was that it should pretty much stay out of the way. You’d open Yummy, search or browse for a bookmark and immediately flip over to Safari to see it. Or you’d start in Safari, add a bookmark that you want to read later and return to what you were doing.
In this usage pattern, if you have Yummy open for more than a couple of minutes at a time I’ve probably failed. Which means that doing a full refresh every, say, thirty minutes would be a waste of time.
Instead, Yummy checks to see whether there are any new updates to download every time you start it. Usually there are not and the refresh is almost instant. In fact, most users should never really need to use the refresh button at all — indeed I almost did not include it in the finish application.
But, with great power comes great responsibility. If you refresh very frequently occasionally Yummy will tell you “Delicious says that you’re refreshing too quickly.” The cause of this is, well, exactly as it says. Delicious will only allow a client to do a full refresh once every thirty minutes or so (the exact time seems to vary). This is not a limitation of Yummy; it’s a limit imposed by Delicious.
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.
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,
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.
I don’t know about you but I often delicious web pages that I want to read later and have no intention of keeping. This is just one of the reasons you might want to delete a bookmark from your iPhone. Luckily Yummy can help you.
Starting from the list view — either by date or tag — press the “Edit” button in the top right of the screen. All your bookmarks will immediately show red and white “delete” icons.
Press the delete icon and you’ll be asked to confirm your action. Press “Delete” and the bookmark will be gone. If you’re not connected to the internet, the bookmark will immediately disappear from Yummy and will actually be removed next time you’re online.
When you have finished removing bookmarks, press the “Done” button in the top, right of the screen.
By now you will have downloaded your bookmarks, browsed and searched for something particular and drilled down to see more details about it. Today we’ll learn what you can do if you spot something that you’d like to change.
The first step is to find your bookmark. Then press the edit button in the top, right hand side of the screen:
If you want to change the notes, just press that part of the screen and a text box and keyboard will appear.
Press “Save” to confirm the change. Note that at this point you have not committed the change back to delicious.com; you can still change your mind.
When you are sure, press the “Done” button. Yummy sends your change back to delicious (or remembers it for the next time you’re connected to the internet).