Category: support

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news support

Delicious Maintenance Window

In case you missed it, Delicious have announced that:

We plan to take the system offline this Wednesday, 19 Oct, from 10 PM to 2 AM PST in order to update our data tier and make some improvements to our search infrastructure.

I am assuming that this means that the site and the API’s will be inaccessible for those four hours. Practically speaking, this means that you won’t be able to sync Yummy.

However, adding, editing and deleting of bookmarks in Yummy will continue to work and any changes you make should sync back to Delicious when they’re back online.

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faq news support

Yummy and iOS5

I’ve been running the iOS 5 beta’s since late July and have not seen any major problems in all that time, so I think you’re unlikely to have any problems. Of course, please let me know if you do see anything untoward.

Having said that, Yummy does not have any iOS 5 exclusive features. It still uses its inbuilt Twitter client rather than the one built into iOS; there’s no iCloud support or any of the other nice and shiny new stuff.

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news support

Yummy 2.6.3

I have just submitted release 2.6.3 of Yummy and Yummy Browser to Apple for review. It’s an urgent release for a very small number of users — and will make absolutely no difference to everyone else!

Those users are people who tried and partially succeeded in downloading their bookmarks after Delicious transferred ownership from Yahoo! to AVOS.

Update: 10 October In pretty much record time, both apps have been approved.

Even for those affected users, there is a work around:

  • Go to the settings app
  • Find Yummy
  • Switch “Refresh on Startup” to “No.”
  • Exit Settings and relaunch Yummy
  • Press “Logout.”
  • Log back in again.
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news support

Now available: Yummy and Yummy Browser 2.6.2

Both Yummy and Yummy Browser version 2.6.2 are now available for download on the App Store.

In some ways it’s significant not for what it adds but for what it removes. Since Delicious is no longer owned by Yahoo!, I have removed Yahoo! ID support and made some minor modifications so that it works correctly with the new, AVOS-owned Delicious.

One thing that I have noticed recently is a number of “502” errors. Just retrying seems to work most of the time. I’m pretty certain that this is a problem at the Delicious end, though I am continuing to investigate.

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support

That Syncing Feeling

One of the most common support emails I get is when users have a problem syncing with Delicious (or Pinboard.in). In this post I hope to cover the most common problems and their solutions.

Maybe the first thing to discuss is why, if Yummy has been on sale since 2008, are users still having problems with something as basic as downloading bookmarks? The short answer is that there there are three major components that need to be working correctly for the process to complete, only one of which is Yummy. The others are the network and Delicious.com itself.

“Delicious.com says that you’re refreshing too quickly”

If Delicious.com thinks that you’re connecting to their servers too often, they stop responding to your requests. This is most likely to happen if you try to sync multiple clients in rapid succession or, perhaps, start Yummy syncing and press the “Home” button on your iPhone. Yummy does not currently continue syncing in the background so the next time you launch it, it starts the whole process again.

The answer here is to exit Yummy and wait a while before trying again. You might also try switching to a different network (e.g., from 3G to WiFi) and try again.

Error Code 999

This is Delicious’ general error; “Something went wrong but we’re not exactly sure what.” In practice is means pretty much the same thing as the ‘refreshing too quickly’ error and can be treated in exactly the same way.

Error Code 500

There are two possible sources for this message. If the error comes directly from Delicious, then your best option is simply to wait a bit and try again. These problems are usually temporary and they usually fix themselves.

Alternatively, it could be your wireless connection. 3G networks, especially, sometimes do weird things with messages before they get to their destination. The quick-and-dirty solution is just to use a different network. WiFi networks are usually more reliable and quicker and have fewer oddities.

The other option is to go into the settings and change the “Sync Speed” option. This will either be set to “Fastest” or “Normal” depending on how you authenticate with Delicious. If you switch this to a slower setting it should make the syncing more reliable, albeit slower.

“The certificate for this server is invalid”

This has happened around the middle of May for the last couple of years. It means that Yahoo! have forgotten to renew their SSL certificates (or that something has been misconfigured). This means that your iPhone cannot establish a secure connection with the Delicious.com servers and, therefore, refuses to continue.

The solution to this is to wait until Yahoo! renew and correctly configure their certificate.

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faq howto news support

Yummy 2.6: Bookmark editing

I discussed the new bookmark view yesterday. Today I’d like to talk about the new editing view.

In the past I’ve heard a few complaints about this screen. Firstly, the navigation was a little… quirky. Secondly, there just wasn’t enough space to add as many tags as people wanted. Thirdly, you had to type in all the tags. A few versions ago I added a way to pick from your existing tags and, while most people agreed that it was useful, many wished for something more like in the Mail app. And finally, I got complaints that you had to manually enter the bookmark title.

In Yummy 2.6 I present a completely new editing screen.

I think it’s fair to say that all these suggestions have been addressed.
Rather than try to squeeze everything onto one screen as happened with the previous version, Yummy 2.6 now places each of the major fields in separate tabs. This leaves plenty of space to enter your notes, tags and a title.
It also allowed me to address the other requests. For a long time it’s been possible to get Yummy to find the title of a web page, but a number of people never found it. The extra space means that there’s a big button above the tab bar and below the text box.
For entering tags, as you can see in the screen shot, Yummy will suggest the top four tags starting with the letters you’ve started typing. When there are three or fewer suggestions, the right-most button takes you to the edit screen, much as it did in the previous versions. One “glitch” you may notice is that long tags flow over the bounds of each button. This does, I’ll concede, look a little messy but by truncating each tag it would make it difficult to distinguish between some longer words. I felt that being useful trumped being pretty.
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faq news support

Logging into Delicious

While Delicious has not gained a huge number of new features over the last few years, it has acquired a wide range of ways to log in.

A couple of years ago, there was a simple username and password.

Then in late 2009, new accounts came with a Yahoo! ID. Yummy was the first, and for a long time only, iPhone client to support the new accounts.

Even more recently, Yahoo! added the option to create a new Delicious account using your Google or Facebook credentials. I didn’t see an announcement for this. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. It seems that their development team didn’t see the notice either.

That’s right. As I type this, there is no way that I can support Delicious accounts with Google and Facebook credentials. I am told that it’s “on the roadmap” but I’ve seen no indication when we might see that or what it might look like.

In summary, it is not possible for any third-party client, including Yummy, to support Google or Facebook credentials when logging into Delicious. Please do not buy a copy of Yummy if this is a requirement for you.

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news support

Yummy 2.5.1

Last night Apple flipped the magic switch and the latest version of Yummy tumbled out and into the App Store. As you can tell with the .1 increment, it’s a minor release and includes the following changes:

  • Remove low memory warning in web preview 
  • Correctly remove deleted bookmarks when syncing with pinboard.in 
  • Display pinboard.in login buttons when enabling option in Settings.app 
  • Fix a couple of visual glitches in iPad version 
  • Show new bookmarks at the top of the “by date” view

The first one I mentioned in my last post. Basically, something annoying that happened previously (but with the best of intentions) has been removed. This increases the risk that Yummy will quit unexpectedly if it runs out of memory but these days that should be pretty infrequent.

The second should be self-explanatory. Pinboard users are pack-rats so I don’t that this affected too many users!

The third affects people who don’t have a delicious.com account and enable pinboard.in support in the Settings.app. There is, however, still one “gotcha.” After flipping the switch in Settings.app you’ll need to wait a few seconds — thirty to be safe — before Yummy will be able to pick up the change. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it seems that Apple do not save the new values for a while after changing them.

The glitches in the iPad version were just cosmetic (but looked a bit odd).

And, finally, the new bookmarks. When you added a new bookmark in Yummy, it initially and briefly has no date. In 2.5.0 it appeared in the “by date” list as older than your oldest bookmark and, therefore, practically inaccessible. This version now puts in a fake date and time (now) until Delicious.com (or pinboard.in) sends the correct value back a little later.

None of these problems affected Yummy Browser so that stays on 2.5.0 for the moment.

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news reviews support

Reviews

I don’t often draw attention to specific reviews either in iTunes or elsewhere on the Internet but recently I found a couple that are interesting for different reasons that I thought might be interesting to post.

First, from Fumi2008 in the UK App Store:

“Been a long time user of this. Many other clients seemed to have fallen by the way side. Nice update. Most of all, thanks for keeping this application moving.”

It’s always nice to have happy users but that’s not what I want to draw to your attention here. It’s the fact that Yummy has been actively updated since it’s initial release in 2008, with an average of just over a hundred days between major releases. Some releases have been bigger than others but they’ve all, I think, had useful new features. I can’t promise to keep up that schedule for ever (indeed some of the remaining feature requests are pretty hard!) but I can say that Yummy is an application that I use myself every day, so I have every incentive to keep it both working and functional.

Second, from frinkle in the UK App Store:

“Yummy keeps interrupting my reading with dialogues about downloading. Then it either exits the page or reloads. Both annoying. Instapaper is much easier to use.”

The “dialogue about downloading” is, I assume, the Memory Warning that I wrote about in February 2009. I’ll be honest here. I have never like the memory warning; I didn’t really want to include it. As I said:

“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.“

However, February 2009 was when the iPhone 3G was the latest and greatest. Since then there have been two phones (and one iPad), both of which have more memory, and I’ve made optimisations and bug fixes in Yummy such that I am no longer convinced that Yummy quitting because of a lack of memory is going to happen regularly.

Therefore I have removed the warning from the version of Yummy (2.5.1) that I have just submitted to Apple for review. I’ll be monitoring the crash logs, though, just in case I’m wrong.

As to the second point about Instapaper, well, I don’t think that Yummy performs the same tasks as Instapaper. I think both apps follow the same design philosophy to a certain extent — wait for the next paragraph — but I certainly think that there’s room on your iPhone for both apps.

The final review I want to mention is by i-5-m in the UK App Store:

“It’s not beautiful, but it is functional.”

I want to mention this because… it’s true. Many people associate “polish” with flash animations and custom graphics. I don’t. These visuals do appear to be neat when you first launch it but they quickly get in the way. I want to put your bookmarks front and centre. I think by being functional and using Apple’s standard UI components (almost) exclusively I am advancing that aim.

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howto news support

Improved Yahoo! ID login in Yummy 2.5

Remember the bad old days? When you used your Yahoo! ID to log into Yummy you had to leave the app, go into Safari, remember a number… Well, it wasn’t really that hard but there were more steps than I wanted. 
Yummy 2.5 changes that.

Now you never have to leave Yummy how ever you log into Delicious. This behaviour is actually contrary to the OAuth spec but the user experience is so much better and simpler I thought that it was worth breaking some rules.

Yahoo! do not serve a mobile-optimised web site so it requires a little scrolling around, but I still think that this is more convenient that switching over to Safari and back again. Of course, this works better on the iPad, which has a much bigger screen.