Wandle SoftwareThis is just a quick update to an old post about sending bookmarks from Twitterrific to Yummy. An update to Twitterrific seems to have slightly broken the mechanism.
If you followed that original advice you would probably find that the URL in Yummy would be prefixed by “url=”, which meant that you had to manually edit it to make it useful. The solution is easy:
Enter “yummy://post?” into the “Add Bookmark” field (without the quotes).
I have also gone back and updated the original post.
It’s been a while since I last mentioned some recent changes with the way new Delicious.com users log into system so I thought it was time for an update.
In short, I am in the late stages of implementing this change and should be submitting to Apple soon afterwards. Apple say that 75% of apps are approved within two weeks currently. If you are unable to use Yummy at the moment and would be willing to beta test an early version, please let me know.
You may be asking yourself, it’s just the login screen — just one lousy screen — why is this taking so long?
Good question.
I’m sure you don’t care about what goes on “under the hood” so let’s just think about the user interface. The log in screen in Yummy 2.3.1 looks like this:
You enter your Delicious.com username and password, it validates them and downloads your bookmarks. Easy.
This is not how the new Yahoo! ID scheme works. Instead what happens is that you get sent to a Yahoo! web page where you enter your username and password and then get send back to the application, in this case Yummy. At no point does Yummy ever actually see either your username or password. There is all kinds of clever stuff going on behind the scenes, including cryptographic hashes and digital signatures, to make this happen. If you’re interested in the details it’s called OAuth.
That’s to say that it’s not just a matter of taking your credentials and asking Yahoo! to check them, which is how it works with the old system.
And then, every time you want to talk to Delicious.com Yummy has to make sure that you are still entitled to talk to Delicious.com.
But even that is not all.
Yahoo! didn’t just replace their old scheme with the new one. Instead some users need to use the old scheme and others need this new Yahoo! ID method. So firstly I have to make all of Yummy work with both methods and then I have to make a user interface where you can either enter a user name or do the Yahoo! OAuth shuffle. But not both for the same user. And try not to make users have to enter the same information twice. I mean how annoying would it be to enter your Yahoo! user name only to be told that you had to enter the same information again a minute later? This only happens once, but it’s your first impression of Yummy.
So if you’re stuck with a copy of Yummy that you’re unable to use because you have a Yahoo! ID, I apologise for the wait but this is a big and unplanned change. But the good news is that an updated version should be available shortly.
I have just learned that Yahoo! have just made a significant change to the way that new users are required to sign into Delicious.com.
In short, new users need to log in using their Yahoo ID rather than a username and password that is unique to Delicious.com. Unfortunately they also changed the way that third-party clients, such as Yummy, need to authenticate users.
This means that if you have one of these new Yahoo! ID Delicious.com accounts, you will not be able to log in to your account with Yummy. I am working as fast as I can to provide an update that will work, but the new scheme is not adequately documented and there’s still the App Store review process gauntlet that needs to be tackled. This means that even if everything goes well it could be a couple of weeks before an update is downloadable.
If you’re an existing user I have better news: Yummy will continue to work. But if you are given the option to “upgrade” your account to use a Yahoo! ID, please say “no” until you have an updated version of Yummy.
My apologies if you are affected by this change but, unfortunately, it is entirely outside my control. Yahoo! provided no advanced notice which is frustrating to say the least. I would imagine that most other third party developers have also been affected.
There’s a new release of Yummy on its way to your iPhone or iPod touch. It’s a minor release and contains the following three changes:
I added the last item when it looked as though tr.im support was going to be very short-lived! None of these affect Yummy Browser so that stays on version 2.3.0.
One thing that you might notice about the new version of Yummy, along with the enhancements it will also come with something that is worse than the previous version. Yes, you read that right. Of course, this isn’t by my choosing. Any app with web preview is now required by Apple to have a 17+ rating.
So, this doesn’t mean that the error messages now have expletives or that it automatically redirects you to porn sites occasionally. It just means that if you click the right links in the web preview you can get to questionable content. Just as you can in MobileSafari.
Yummy Browser, incidentally, keeps its 4+ rating as it doesn’t have a built-in web browser and provides no way to add new, suspicious content.
I thought that is was worth mentioning a couple of small things about the recent 2.3 release of Yummy.
The eagle-eyed will notice that it has support for the tr.im URL shortening service. Since I submitted the binary to Apple it has been shut down and subsequently resurected. On hearing the announcement I quickly scrambled together a new release that removed tr.im support and added tinyurl.com as an option. Given their change of heart I’m glad I didn’t submit a new binary.
And then on Tuesday evening I found a bug: if you enable the Twitter client option but disable the “Shorten URL” feature you might find that it doesn’t work as expected. Tweetie, for example, opens but you don’t get a new tweet to edit.
This is because Yummy “encodes” the URL before sending it and some Twitter clients don’t know how to interpret it. The work-around is to enable one of the “Shorten URL” options. (If you’re using Tweetie you’ll want to use bit.ly as it tries to shorten any URL it comes across… and you don’t want a URL shortened with is.gd shortened again with bit.ly!)
Apologies that this slipped through my testing. I’ll submit a point release that fixes this shortly.
I just got the email that iPhone developers love to see: “Your application is now Ready for Sale”
So it’s probably not there in iTunes as I type this but version 2.3 of Yummy should be available in the next few hours. As a recap, key features in this version are:
If you’re keeping track, at the time of writing, these are numbers 1, 2 and 4 in the list of user feedback on UserVoice and SimplyTweet support came from a user my email.
Of course there are the usual bug fixes and refinements (you now get a “Progress” screen when posting to Instapaper rather than just locking up the UI).
At the same time, they also approved version 2.3 of Yummy Browser.
In this version you get the scrolling bookmark names that was originally introduced in Yummy 2.2. This version also includes adverts on the home screen. This is an experiment. If it works, you might see functionality working its way down from the full version of Yummy more quickly.
Maybe it’s a case of having more users or maybe it’s Yahoo, the owners of the Delicious.com service, adjusting some parameter, but recently I’ve been seeing an increase in the number of people seeing “Error 999” when they start a refresh of their bookmarks in Yummy.
So what does it mean? What am I going to do to fix it? What can you do when you get it? And what can you do to prevent it? That’s what I hope to answer with this blog.
Status Code 999 is Yahoos “generic” error message. It typically means that you’ve been trying to refresh too frequently though there are a number of other causes.
Unfortunately, since the error comes straight from Yahoo, there is nothing I can do in Yummy to fix this, at least not directly.
I believe the number one cause of it is users not allowing Yummy to finish downloading all their bookmarks. This forces Yummy to download every bookmark every time you launch it, something that Yahoo tries to discourage. Once it has completed its initial download, Yummy will only ask for the bookmarks that have changed.
This makes the only significant preventative measure: if Yummy is refreshing its cache, don’t exit unless you really need to.
The next version of Yummy will make it harder to exit half way through the initial download of bookmarks. Details of this will be coming soon.
If you do get Error 999, the first thing to try is just waiting a while and trying again. This usually works. “A while” does vary. I would leave it an hour or two at the very least.
Another thing worth trying is switching to WiFi if you’re currently on your cell/mobile network or vice versa. The fact that you’re coming from a different internet address often makes a difference.
In the past few weeks I have received a few emails and one review in the App Store saying some variation of “Yummy asks for my password every time I start it. How do I make it stop?”
In fact, Yummy, does save your password, but there are two cases where it will ask for the password anyway.
The first case is the most obvious: your Delicious.com password has changed. I’m guessing that this isn’t the case here, though.
The second case is where Yummy has not finished downloading all your bookmarks for the first time. The simple solution here is to let it download all your bookmarks before exiting. If you have a lot of bookmarks you might find that it’s quicker to use WiFi rather than the cell/mobile network. If you have thousands of bookmarks this may take a while, and the UI may become unresponsive for short periods of time. Once complete, if you look at the menu screen you should see the text “Last sync:” and then a time, which indicates the last activity on your Delicious.com account.
Note that this only refers to the first complete sync; after this Yummy should not ask for your password again. Incidentally, you can see how many bookmarks Yummy knows about in the About screen. And Delicious tells you on your home page:
If you’re sure that you’ve entered your password correctly and that Yummy has the full compliment of bookmarks and you’re still being asked for enter your password every time, please let me know.
Many readers will already know that the new version of the iPhone operating system, 3.0, is scheduled to hit the wires later today.
I’ve been using Yummy with the new iPhone OS for a while now. The last release of Yummy and Yummy Browser both included minor fixes to make them compatible with the new OS. I am not aware of any issues though, as ever, if you find anything please do let me know (you should find a support link to the right of this page and there are two buttons on the About screen). Neither version makes any special use of the new features of 3.0 but things like cut-and-paste work just fine.
In related news, I am still working on the next version of Yummy. It will be more 3.0-ish (in that it supports landscape mode) but will continue to work on handsets running iPhone OS 2.x. It is likely that subsequent versions will require OS 3.0 or higher.