Category: news

It all started with an innocuous looking email to Yummy’s support email address:

Tagging seams a bit buggy. When I try to correct a typo with the cursor it works the first time (laggy though) but the second time I’m not able to move the cursor anymore.

Without getting too technical (visit my question on StackOverflow if you want to see them), the way the iPhone works is that it tells the application when events happen and the application can respond appropriately. When certain events occur, you are expected to behave in a particular way in addition to your own actions.

Of course there are lots of events that happen that the application is not interested in. I could rotate the phone into portrait mode or touch in the middle of the toolbar where there are no buttons or hold the phone to my ear, all of which the phone can detect but I don’t care about.

So, inside Yummy I could be responding to events incorrectly or I could be ignoring events that I should be listening for. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the former, though I did spend some time checking. It took me nearly two weeks to convince myself that it wasn’t the latter either.

So what’s left? As far as I can see, the only code running at the time of the “laggy cursor” is Apple’s so I raised a bug report with them.

Of course even if Apple decide to help, that doesn’t help you immediately.

In the end I got lucky. After getting nowhere for those two weeks the fix that you should be seeing very shortly came to me in the middle of the night. It’s not a complete solution but it works significantly better than before and I also managed to sneak in another smaller fix while I was putting the release together. More details when it hits iTunes.

One of the hard things about buying an iPhone application is that, unlike Mac or Windows programs, there is no way that you can see the program in action without actually buying it. Even when the cost is less than a latte at your local coffee franchise, the thought of putting down money for something without seeing it in action makes the process harder than it might be.

Much is in Apple’s court. There is no way, for example, that I can make available a demo version. I can, however, do one better one better than screenshots. With apologies for the poor audio quality, here is a “screencast,” a quick overview of Yummy’s key features in video form.

What do you think? Does this give you a better idea of what Yummy is like to use?