Wandle SoftwareA new version of Yummy is on the way to the App Store.
Sadly, this version removes support for syncing with Delicious.com. The Delicious API has been broken since March so it feels dishonest to claim support when we’re not able to. I apologise if you’re affected by this change but I’m afraid it’s outside our control. Please contact Delicious if you would like to bring back this functionality.
Back in March I wrote about a Delicious API outage. I assumed that it was a short term problem caused by them moving web hosts. But it’s now July and the service is still not back, meaning that users of Yummy and other third party clients still see no error and no bookmarks. (Actually, it’s worse than that: half the web site seems to be broken, with dead images and links abound. I think the whole endeavour is over.)
At this point I see no point in maintaining Delicious support in Yummy. When you consider that the app is named after the site this feels a little crazy but pretending that Yummy supports Delicious when it can’t is starting to feel dishonest, even though this is not a problem of my making.
Because of this, I will shortly be sending an update to Apple that disables Delicious support. After this, it will only sync with Pinboard.in.
A new version of Yummy is on its way to the App Store and it features the following new features:
Both of these features are only present in the “pro” version (you can upgrade with an in-app purchase) on iPhones, iPads or iPod touches running iOS 9.2 or higher.
The thumbnails rely on an internal (non-Spotlight) index of all your bookmarks. It may take a while for all of them to be fully indexed if you have a lot. Normally the refresh process takes place after each sync, updating a few bookmarks each time (starting with the newest to the oldest).
Websites will need to support the OpenGraph standard for defining thumbnail images for them to appear. This is something that we hope to expand in future versions of Yummy, but this will always be dependent on the pages you bookmark to some extent.
Once a bookmark has been indexed, the thumbnail will automatically appear both in the bookmark view and in Spotlight searches.
Link rotOver time, the bookmarks that you save become out of date, redirecting away to another page or just pointing to nothing — the famous “404 Not Found” error. Yummy can’t stop that process but it can help you find the affected bookmarks more easily.
It relies on the same indexing process used by to find the thumbnails. The HTTP status is shown in the bookmark list view and also in the edit bookmark screen (where it also show the “official” name for the code, in case you can’t remember what, say, a 503 is).
You can also filter by status code using the “Filter” menu introduced in Yummy 3.1. It’s split into three categories, broadly everything is okay (200 and above), permission denied (400 and above) and server error (500 and above).
If you’re thinking that these are pretty big updates for a point release, you’d be right. These have been ready to go since before iOS 9 launched. Unfortunately there was a bug in iOS 9 prior to version 9.2 that caused 64-bit iPhones and iPads to restart. (That is, it wasn’t Yummy that crashed but the whole phone. This is called a kernel panic.) We’re really happy to be able to release these new features but sorry it took so long. We hope you like it.
I just submitted a minor update to www.cut that improves its iOS 9 support.
It now works with side-by-side multi-tasking and fills the screen of an iPad Pro (I say fills rather than uses as it’s hard to make a couple of text boxes and three buttons to use a 12″ screen!).
Apple have been taking about a week to approve updates, so fingers crossed. (However, it’s only fair to note that it took several attempts to get 3.3 on the App Store.)
Yummy 3.2 is the second of our apps to get an update for iOS 9. Yummy, however, gets a much more significant update.
The bad news — if you can consider it like that — is that this update requires iOS 9. If you’re running Yummy 3 already, your device can run iOS 9 so this shouldn’t be a problem. (It’s a nice update. You should upgrade anyway.)
Yummy 3.2 is built using the latest developer kit and so supports all the latest devices, including the iPhone 6S, iPad mini 4 and iPad Pro.
In practical terms, that means you can use the split-screen multi-tasking on all the current iPads; and on the 6S and 6S Plus, Yummy also supports 3D-touch short-cut menus on the home screen. (More 3D touch support may come in future versions.)
After you’ve upgraded to Yummy 3.2, the Spotlight integration should “Just Work.” It currently indexes the title and the notes field of each bookmark. (It seems unlikely that you’d be searching for the URL itself, so that is not currently added to the index.)
Yummy 3.2 supports many more options for URL schemes. There are three main end points:
For bookmarks you can add parameters to make them more interesting:
Since Yummy 3, the bookmark list has shown the title, notes, tags and private/public/to read flags. Yummy 3.2 now allows you to customise what you see, so if you want to see the URL but not your tags, now you can. Go to the Settings screen to edit.
I just submitted it to Apple for review. Hopefully it should be available to download in about a week.
The first iOS 9 update to make it out of Wandle HQ is for our sharing utility app, ShareEverywhere.
Other than the usual minor fixes and enhancements, most improvements come with iOS 9. For example, on some of the newer iPads you get the “slide over” multitasking feature, that might allow you to tweak a setting before launching the sharer in the main app. Not an everyday occurrence, perhaps, but useful.
Behind the scenes, the biggest change is support for Apple’s “Application Transport Security,” which means that a secure connection is used for all services where available. “Where available” is an important qualifier here as most services currently require a slight loosening of requirements to work. (“Forward secrecy” is the least commonly supported feature. This requirement needed to be relaxed for Twitter, Pinboard.in, Diigo, ImgUr, Facebook and Tumblr.)
With luck, ShareEverywhere 1.1.2 should be available for download in a week or so.
Recently, for unknown reasons, I’ve seen a substantial increase in the number of crash reports for Yummy. Sadly I’ve not seen very many of them on my own devices and I’ve not been able to reliably reproduce them.
Yummy 3.1.1, however, is my attempt to fix as many of them as possible.
Additionally, you should see a “delete” button on the edit bookmark screen — functionality that was, of course, already present but it’s no bad thing to make it easier to find and use.
Other than that, there should be very little that is user visible. If you have a lot of bookmarks or tags, you might see a slight loss of smoothness in the UI while syncing. I have removed some “clever” code — which was there for the benefit of performance — and replaced it with simpler, hopefully more reliable code. This should be a net win for everyone. I’ll try to add back the performance improvements where it makes sense.
A free copy of Quick Calendar and Rootn Tootn to everyone who can tell me where the “for Workgroups” ‘joke’ comes from.
It should be available to download in about a week. Enjoy.
I’ve just submitted a minor update of ShareEverywhere to Apple for approval. If past performance is any indicator, it will be available for you to download in a week or so.
In addition to the usual bug fixes and minor improvements, there are two new actions:
You may find that the order of the sharers has been reset in this version — that was unavoidable when adding the new options I’m afraid — and you might need to log into LinkedIn again, since they changed some details with their API.
Introducing Yummy 3.1, the first feature update of Yummy since the completely new version 3 first hit the App Store earlier this year. It’s currently with Apple for review and should be available to download in a week or so.
With each release of Yummy, we try to have a main focus. The theme for version 3.1 is tags. To that end, here are some of the highlights:
But just because tags were the main focus doesn’t mean that there are no other features:
Let’s talk about those features in more detail.
You can ask Pinboard or Delicious for suggestions when you’re creating or editing a bookmark; you can filter bookmarks (by date, shared/private, to read) and tags (number of bookmarks) and sort (alphabetically, chronologically, by tag count). The speed of modern hardware make these options possible when they were not when Yummy was first written.
Saved search is a popular feature that was in Yummy 2.x but didn’t make the cut for 3.0. It’s back in 3.1 and it better than ever. It now syncs between your devices using iCloud. If you flag a search as a “Favourite” then it will appear on the home screen ready for quick access.
As ever, there are a lot of other, smaller features that I won’t get into here. It’s a pretty big update for a “0.1”. We hope you like it.
Update 25 June 2015: Available for download now.
In the olden days, Apple added the Dashboard to Mac OS X. It had lots of potential — widgets to quickly give you information or make simple calculations — but it stagnated and then has pretty much gone in Yosemite (10.10). By and large it has been replaced by the Notification Centre.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but there’s one widget that I use all the time: a simple monthly calendar. It didn’t link to Apple’s Calendar to show events or anything clever. It was just a quick way to work out that, say, next Friday is the 23rd or that February 24th is a Tuesday.
And, oddly, it’s not there in the Notification Centre. There’s a list of todays events. There’s a list of your reminders. There’s what’s happening tomorrow. The weather. But not a simple calendar widget.
Well, now there is. Or at least, will be soon. I’ve submitted my Mac calendar widget to the Mac App Store and, with luck, it’ll be available soon.. It will be free but we accept donations right inside the app if you’d like to support us and help us product future updates.