I’ve been very surprised how many bookmarks some users of Yummy have. What I’d like to find out, with your help, is how many a “typical” user has.
Thank you.
Category: trivia
As some of you already know, next week is Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, where Macintosh and iPhone developers gather to learn how to build better applications and all the exciting new technologies coming in new versions of their operating systems.
Unfortunately I don’t have either the time or money to attend but I did take a couple of pictures as I passed by this afternoon.
If you can spot the Yummy icon you can win a free copy!
Back in February I documented how to publish a bookmark to Delicious using TwitterFon and Yummy. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a simple or convenient method — building your own program is not for everyone!
Luckily if you use Twitterrific things just got easier.
If you go into the Advanced Settings screen in Twitterrific you’ll see the following:
(Yes, you can post bookmarks to Instapaper here too. If you have a password you might prefer to use Yummy to do that until The Icon Factory push out an update.)
Enter “yummy://post?” into the “Delicious.com” field (without the quotes) and you’re done.
Next time you click on a link you’ll also be able to send it to Yummy. Two limitations I’ve noticed. Firstly the link you get is likely to be shortened (for example “http://is.gd/enCu”). Secondly, the title field will not be populated. I am going to look into what I can do to help here.
I just read this post by PlanetBeing about Apple’s relationship with the jail-break and application cracking community. While I have some sympathy with his position I can’t wholeheartedly agree. There are rational reasons why developers and Apple might not support jail-breaking even if it does nothing to help extinguish piracy.
Back in March when I wrote about my experience with Yummy users who have jail-broken handsets I tried to be very careful to make a distinction between the process of jail-breaking and that of pirating apps. In principle I have no problem with people freeing their phones from the shackles that Apple include.
However, one of the nice things about developing for the iPhone is that it is a closed system. When you write a program for the Mac or Windows or Solaris you have to deal with all kinds of variables that you have no control over. Does your program work when someone plugs in a ten year old scanner? When they plug in an iSCSI disk? With five monitors? When they virtualise the OS? When they use Solaris Zones? (All these are actual problems I’ve come across over the years I’ve worked in IT.) Fundamentally you just don’t know. While you wouldn’t expect them to make a difference, you can’t count them out. And when you’re supporting software you have to take into account the costs of tracking down, identifying and fixing these obscure problems that you can’t actually see on your own hardware.
On the iPhone, as with most games consoles, you have none of this. An iPhone is an iPhone. You can rely on the amount of memory available. You know there’s one screen with one size. The few areas of variation are well known.
When people start changing the operating system, as happens when you jail-break a phone, all these things you can rely on become, well, less reliable. It can be small things like performance tuning. With a stock iPhone I can try to make my application responsive because I know how aggressively I can cache data. Jail-broken phones often have less, sometime substantially less, memory available. (Actually, I say a small thing. For an application within certain bounds performance is a “nice to have.” For a game your tolerances may be much smaller.)
More significantly, some system level components that you can usually rely on can change under your feet. In the case of the “blank tags” bug in Yummy it was because the version of SQLite sometimes changes when you jail-break.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to track this problem down and in the end only stumbled across the solution by accident.
What I’m trying to say here is that while we can agree that people who jail-break their handsets are not all stealing their applications, we cannot pretend that their actions have zero cost. The time that I spent tracking down the bug could have been better spent adding new features or fixing bugs that affect all users and not just a minority.
PlanetBeing says that the jail-break community does not “believe that Apple should have a support burden for modified devices.” I think developers of third party applications deserve a similar break.
I have just been watching the video announcement of the new iPhone operating system and considering how it will impact Yummy.
What follows are my first impressions of the announcements. I am deliberately writing this before I’ve seen the SDK so I can be sure that I am not violating the NDA, but that does mean that some of the things I speculate may not even be possible. That is, these are thoughts and not commitments. These are also opinions as a developer rather than a user of an iPhone. As a user there are undoubtedly some useful new features but it seems to me that the SDK is where the real news is.
So, in no particular order:
Mail sheet. This is great. The ability to send a link by email without leaving Yummy will be a great improvement. I would also like the ability for third party applications to have similar functionality. How cool would it be for, say, TwitterFon to have an “Add to Delicious” button that showed a Yummy screen to complete the task. Or for Yummy to be able to send links to Twitter using a Twittelator screen?
Cut and paste. I am not as convinced as some people that this is an absolutely critical enhancement, but it’s still going to be nice to have. One particular scenario that I would use is copying some text on a web page, post the link using Yummy and add some notes that includes the quote. You can’t really do that right now without a notepad and paper!
Core data. This is a pretty technical one but it jumped off the page when I saw it on the slides, though it wasn’t mentioned much more than that. Core Data is an Apple-endorsed way of saving data to a database with fairly simple and well-tested code. My hand-crafted code won’t go away any time soon (since I’ll still need to support OS 2.x for a while yet) but this is going to make writing future applications much easier.
Spotlight search. Mac OS 10.4 was worth the upgrade for Spotlight alone, even in the fairly unfinished state it was in then. An iPhone stores much less data and the data that is there is fairly well compartmentalised so I’m not convinced that it’s going to be quite so useful here. Having said that, I would like to see Spotlight work with the title and notes fields held in Yummy’s cache of your Delicious.com bookmarks.
As far as I can tell, most of the other publicly announced developer-centric features probably don’t impact Yummy. As ever, there is almost certainly some other things that I missed or Apple didn’t tell us about. When I delve into the SDK I’ll have a much better idea. As ever, I’m open to suggestions if you have any ideas.
Anyway, must dash. I have some new code to write…
One question that I realised that I have not answered very clearly yet is, What’s the difference between Yummy and Yummy Browser? That’s what I hope to answer here.
Perhaps obvious, but worth repeating anyway, is that Yummy Browser is the “lite” version of Yummy. The practical upshot being that every feature in Yummy Browser is also in Yummy.
The name indicates the main difference between the two versions. Yummy Browser allows you to browse your Delicious.com bookmarks. That is, you can:
- View your bookmarks by date
- View your bookmarks by tag
You can also view all your meta-data, including the notes field, the date added and the public/private status. Of course there’s no point in just viewing them, so you can also open bookmarks in Safari or send them to Mail so you can send them to your friends.
Yummy Browser is built from exactly the same code as the full version and is, similarly, capable of handling thousands of bookmarks.
The full version of Yummy has a number of great extra features which can be summarised as follows:
- Full editing support. You can add, edit and delete bookmarks directly on your iPhone
- Search for bookmarks by tag(s) or keywords in the title or notes fields
- Built-in web preview so you don’t need to switch over to Safari
- Send bookmarks to Twitter
If you’re a heavy user of Delicious on the move, I think you’ll agree that these extra features are well worth getting. And it’s always nice to know that you can get a feel for Yummy for free.
Yummy Browser, the “lite” version of Yummy, was first available for download late last Wednesday UK time. It reached its first major mile milestone this weekend: more people now have a copy of Yummy Browser than Yummy, which has been on sale since August 2008. It has far exceeded expectations. If you picked up a copy, I hope you like it. And please consider upgrading to the full version of Yummy!
Some interesting trends have also become apparent. After the US, more copies have been downloaded in Japan than anywhere else. This surprises me since the main Delicious.com site is, as far as I can tell, not localised. Also, while I have made a few sales of Yummy there, Japan is way down the league table, far below the US, Canada and most of Western Europe.
Still, Yummy does work with non-Western text (indeed some features have been much harder to implement since I was trying hard not to assume an English/Latin alphabet) so perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.
My wife wrote a special message for Japanese speakers: “iPhoneとdelicious.comを使っていますか。Yummy Appを試してみませんか。yummyapp.com” (I’m told that it means “Use iPhone and Delicious? Have you considered Yummy?” although for all the Japanese I speak it could say “Own a donkey? Always remember to carry a shovel.”)
Something that I was hoping for was wider distribution, into countries that I had never made sales. Indeed that is exactly what’s happened. In the last couple of days I’ve seen my first downloads in India, Russia and Romania.
But I think I should finish on Yummy Browser’s first review in iTunes. It was five stars, which is great. But it’s the text that stood out. Can’t say I’ve ever had a review like it: “Hi colliflower u can eat my poop u stinky hot dog . Enjoy your magic u little wizard.” I honestly don’t know what to think.
Thanks.
I think.
Well, it’s been a busy week, what with the shorter-than-expected half-price sale and the release of Yummy Browser, the free, some would say “lite,” version of Yummy. I’ve also been making some good progress on the next version but there’s not a lot to add at the moment.
Instead I will leave you wish a short video showing some of the key features of Yummy 2.0.
Yes, it’s missing the saved search and tag suggestion features that I introduced in version 2.1 but it’s otherwise entirely up to date.
It’s been a quiet week for the public face of Yummy but a lot has been going on behind the scenes. First, a couple of things that have not happened.
Yummy Browser has now been in Apple’s review queue for ten days and, unfortunately, is still not available for download. This is the longest I’ve had to wait for a a response from Apple, even including the initial version back in August. Given that the last couple of updates to Yummy have gone through in a few hours I am a little surprised. I’m hoping that publicly whinging works as well as it did for Owen Goss and his game, Dapple.
Secondly a user reported a problem where “blank” tags appeared in the “View by Tags” screen of version 2.1 of Yummy. I have been unable to reproduce this myself and have not got any further information. If you have seen this bug and would like to help me track it down and eliminate it, please let me know.
Back to things that did happen.
I made a few changes to Yummy that you’ll see in the coming months. As ever, there are some internal changes that I won’t bore you with. But I have also altered how the bookmark lists looks:
As you can see, there’s part of the URL and an icon indicating that a bookmark is private. I’m trying to balance the restricted amount of space with genuinely useful information. I considered, for example, adding a tiny preview or a favicon but in the end decided that they’d look neat in screenshots and videos but would take up valuable screen real-estate and not have enough utility to be worth the effort involved implementing them. What do you think? Is that the right call?
Finally, it’s always nice to hear from people who use Yummy. There have been some good suggestions on my Uservoice page, but this time I want to mention some reviews. Yummy only just fell out of Paul Boag’s top five iPhone applications and was also listed as one of klmontgomery‘s favourite apps.
Twitter has also been a great source of feedback. I like being able to say that Yummy is “100% anti-KRAPPS Certified app.” It has also been declared “iPhone app of the day” and “Cracking!“
Anyway, that’s the end of this brief immodest interlude and the last of this weeks blogs. See you next week.
A few people have asked if I can provide a way that they can save links they see in tweets to Delicious using Yummy. And the answer to that is… partly. Yummy already has a bookmarklet that you can use in Safari to add bookmarks, and developers can use the same mechanism in their applications. Of course whether people implement that side is not up to me.
That, however, is not the whole story. My current favourite Twitter client for the iPhone is TwitterFon and that is Open Source, which means that I can make changes. The look like this.
You start with your list of tweets:
When you drill down on a tweet with a link, you get to the web view screen. And at the bottom right, much like in Yummy, is an action button where you can do things with the current page. In my tweaked version it looks like this:
Clearly this is not a “production ready” patch. I have not put in any code so that the button is not displayed if you don’t have Yummy for example. If you have the developer tools and would like to apply the patch, here’s the code:
Index: WebViewController.m
===================================================================
--- WebViewController.m (revision 1677)
+++ WebViewController.m (working copy)
@@ -136,7 +136,7 @@
delegate:self
cancelButtonTitle:@"Cancel"
destructiveButtonTitle:nil
- otherButtonTitles:@"Open with Safari", @"Email This Link", nil];
+ otherButtonTitles:@"Open with Safari", @"Email This Link", @"Send to Yummy", nil];
[as showInView:self.navigationController.parentViewController.view];
[as release];
@@ -146,18 +146,29 @@
{
if (as.cancelButtonIndex == buttonIndex) return;
- if (buttonIndex == 0) {
- [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:currentURL];
+ NSString* sendTo;
+ NSString *body;
+
+ switch (buttonIndex) {
+ case 0:
+ [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:currentURL];
+ break;
+ case 1:
+ body = @"nnSent from TwitterFon";
+
+ sendTo = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:?subject=%@&body=%@%@",
+ [titleLabel.text encodeAsURIComponent],
+ currentURL,
+ [body encodeAsURIComponent]];
+ [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:sendTo]];
+ break;
+ case 2:
+ sendTo = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"yummy://post?title=%@&url=%@",
+ [titleLabel.text encodeAsURIComponent],
+ currentURL];
+ [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:sendTo]];
+ break;
}
- else {
- NSString *body = @"nnSent from TwitterFon";
-
- NSString *mailTo = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:?subject=%@&body=%@%@",
- [titleLabel.text encodeAsURIComponent],
- currentURL,
- [body encodeAsURIComponent]];
- [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:mailTo]];
- }
}
- (void)alertView:(UIAlertView *)alertView clickedButtonAtIndex:(NSInteger)buttonIndex