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support

SSL/TLS

You probably didn’t notice, but I’ve switched the website back from using a secure connection (with the padlock in your browser) to an insecure one. My web host has messed up and is serving the wrong certificate which makes the site inaccessible. I’ll switch it back when they’ve fixed it.

Some things like pictures may not display correctly. No personal information is stored here, there’s no real security risk.

Update: It’s now fixed and we’ve reverted back to secure-by-default.

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support

Quick Calendar Interactivity

If you’re using Quick Calendar on a Mac and you’ve not yet upgraded to macOS 11 Big Sur, you might be aware that the “<“ and “>” buttons allow you to move from one month to the next.

Big Sur Quick Calendar Widget
Big Sur Quick Calendar Widget

I’ve had a couple of emails from people who have upgraded to Big Sur asking where those buttons have gone in the new widget and when they might be coming back.

The bad news is: this is not a feature that I took away, but one that Apple made impossible to implement. Widgets in Big Sur are just not interactive. You can’t add buttons or other traditional user interface elements. Notice that even Apple’s Widgets are display-only.

So what can we do? Other than a couple of “long shot” ideas that I won’t discuss until I’ve done some testing, there one thing.

The simplest thing would be to add an “offset.” Currently, the Widget displays the current month plus the next two or four if there’s space. Instead of showing the current month first, it could show, say, last month. This will likely make it into the next version.

If you have any other ideas, please suggest them in the comments below. I can’t promise anything but I’m always happy to hear them.

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support

Wandle Apps and macOS 11 Big Sur

If you upgraded to macOS 11 last week, hopefully, you also got the latest version of Quick Calendar which also includes a new Widget.

Something that you might have seen in Apple’s marketing literature is the ability to run iOS apps on the Mac. To be clear: this is not something that works on existing Mac, only on the brand-new-out-this-week Apple Silicon-based Macs. And the obvious question is, what about Wandle Software’s app? Can you run them on new Macs?

Big Sur Quick Calendar Widget
Big Sur Quick Calendar Widget

There are two answers to this. The first one is yes. I’ve allowed Yummy to be downloaded from the Mac App Store. I turned off the ability to download Quick Calendar since there’s already a Mac app.

But the second answer is: I don’t know. I don’t have an Apple Silicon Mac, so I’ve not tested it. It might work well, or it might not work at all. This also means that if you have problems, I can’t really help. If I hear about a lot of problems I’ll probably disable downloads until the point that I can adequately test it.

So, if you have a new M1 Mac, I hope you enjoy your new toy and I hope my apps work well on it! Please let me know your experiences in the comments below.

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support

Support Questions

Looking in the support mailbag, I noticed a couple of good questions recently that I thought would be worth sharing more widely.

How do you switch the calendar to the Dark theme?

Quick Calendar for the Mac is a useful widget for Notification Centre. Mojave is the New Shiny from Apple. While Quick Calendar works on Mojave, it doesn’t fully support all the new things currently — it comes out in the wrong colours when in dark mode for example.

The good news is that I’m working on a new release that will support Dark Mode and also have a couple of other new features.

Despite being free to download, keeping it working on the latest operating systems does take time and effort. Your donations to the tip jar keep it alive!

Any news about Quick Calendar for iPhone/iPad?

I lied, no one asked about this, but since I’m already talking about the Mac version… Anyway. There’s a new version. It should be released at the same time as the new Mac version. I can’t commit to a timescale, but it should be relatively soon.

Yummy 3 asks for my Pinboard account name and password — where is that info stored and how secure is it?

In hindsight I’m surprised that no one has asked this before — it’s a good question. It’s partly answered in the Privacy Policy (“Wandle apps do not collect analytics that can be traced back to a specific user; Wandle apps do not “call home” periodically”), but a more complete answer would be:

It’s stored in your iPhones keychain, which is the technology Apple provide for storing things like passwords. The password is sent to pinboard to access your bookmarks over a HTTPS (i.e., secure) connection. If you have iCloud Keychain enabled, it may be encrypted and sent to Apple’s servers. Wandle Software has no way to access either your username or password.

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support

GDPR

I know you’re excited. Who wouldn’t be excited about a new EU regulation? But this one is quite important and very wide-ranging. If you’re an EU citizen it covers how companies can use your personal details. That, to be clear, is all companies, wherever in the world they’re located.

Wandle Software is not immune so here, for the sake of transparency, is how we comply.

The short version: Wandle Software does not have any of your details. Apple “owns” the customer relationship, Wandle does not know your name, email address, physical address, credit card details, anything. We can’t misuse the data as we never had access to it.

There is one exception: when you made contact by email or from this site’s contact form. In that case, your details are stored on our email server and on my laptop, and the web server if you used the contact form.

Those details are never collated or used for anything beyond replying. They are currently archived but not deleted. You can request their deletion if you wish. It is a manual process but it will be completed as soon as is practicable.

One final element that you may be curious about: analytics. Some of Wandle’s apps use Fabric.io to collect crash reports and some basic analytics. As apps are updated we’re moving over to using Apple’s built-in tools but, in both cases, no personally identifiable details are recorded, so this is not covered by GDPR.

Overall, the policy is simple because Wandle’s products are designed not to collect superfluous information. The policy will be updated as necessary as the software matures or as new products are released. However, the philosophy will remain.

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support

iOS 11, macOS High Sierra and our apps

At this time of year I get the same questions: do Wandle Software’s apps work on the new version of iOS and do you intend to support its new features? 2017 is no exception, so here’s the news about iOS 11.

As far as I know, all our apps will continue to work correctly on iOS 11. In slightly more detail:

  • Yummy. There appear to be some visual glitches that are caused by some changes, but functionality is unaffected. I’ll issue an update to fix the glitch when I’ve figured out what’s causing it. I also plan to support improved drop and drop support, though maybe not with that first version.
  • Quick Calendar. Designed with iOS 11 in mind. I’ve not seen any problems with the Mac version.
  • ShareEverywhere. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter, it should continue to work as before. iOS 11 removes the system level sharers for Facebook and Twitter, and these are what ShareEverywhere uses. I’m currently not clear whether this functionality can be easily restored.
  • Rootn Tootn. I’ve tested and seen no problems. I’ll keep an eye out when the Golden Master is available.
  • www.cut. I’ve tested and seen no problems. On iPad, it even supports the drag-and-drop functionality.
  • Glider. I’ve not tested the beta version of tvOS yet so I’m not sure. However, I do not anticipate any problems and will fix them if I find anything.

The summary: minor fixes, some minor updates. While both new operating systems have some nice new features, they don’t really affect Wandle’s apps.

Categories
support

Quick Calendar video

I’ve had a few support emails over the last year or so asking how to enable Quick Calendar. In version 1.0.1 I added a better description in the main app, but some people are still unable to get it to work so I thought adding a video might make things easier:

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support

Delicious API Broken

Sadly, Delicious seem to have broken their API when they recently updated their website. This affects all third-party clients including Yummy.

Without getting too technical, every API call tells Yummy that you have no bookmarks. This is why you don’t see any error message. This is also why there is no workaround that I can recommend you make nor any code changes that I can do to help.

Unfortunately this is entirely for Delicious to solve.

I will update if there are any developments.

Categories
support

Delicious Certificate error

If you’re seeing a certificate error when syncing Yummy with Delicious this blog post is for you. 

Unfortunately it’s a problem on the Delicious side so there’s nothing that we can do to fix the fundamental problem — which is that their SSL certificate is either invalid or has expired.

However, what you can do is tell Yummy that you want to ignore the error. This is generally not something I’d recommend, but it’s happened often enough that there’s an option to do exactly that. 

You need to open the Settings.app, scroll down to Yummy and enable the “Ignore invalid certificate” option. I’d recommend you switch it back off when it’s fixed. 

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support

Delicious API Outage

Update 10 April: It appears that the Delicious API is available again and you should be able to sync your bookmarks in Yummy again.

For what it’s worth, I don’t feel that Delicious communicated the problems very well — their blog said, incorrectly, that the API was working — and the amount of time they’ve taken is clearly disappointing. Sadly short of hosting our own bookmarking service, there is little that we Wandle Software can do when this happens.

At the time of writing most users will not be able to log into or sync with their Delicious account using Yummy or any other third party clients. The cause of this is Delicious moving data centres:

We are currently in the process of moving our data center. The entire maintenance window is expected to be from Friday April 3rd at 8:00 p.m. PT until Saturday April 4th 9:00 a.m. PT. During this time you may experience interruptions when saving and retrieving links. We are anticipating a full site outage at some point during that window,  but we are expecting it to last less than 1 hour.

It appears that they hit, or nearly reached, this target for their website but there are a number of unresolved issues around the periphery (feeds, importing/exporting links). They have not explicitly mentioned the API — the method by which Yummy accesses your bookmarks — but it’s certainly not working for me and I have received a number of support requests.

It appears that some work is ongoing. Over the weekend I was getting “503” errors (“Service Unavailable”) but as of Tuesday morning requests are failing with “invalid certificate” errors. If you’d like to validate this yourself, you can do so with the following command (replacing username and password with your actual username and password):

curl ‘https://username:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/update’

I can only apologise for this outage and wish that there was something that I could do to help. In the meantime, I am waiting to submit Yummy 3.0.2 in case there are some required changes that they have not currently documented.

Please follow the Delicious and Wandle Software Twitter feed for more real time updates.