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howto support tutorial

Pinboard.in Support in Yummy 2.5

Yummy 2.5 adds support for the social bookmarking site for introverts, pinboard.in. It is, however, disabled by default, so today I want to talk about how to enable it.
The first step is — obviously — to enable it. You can open the Settings app or use the settings option from Yummy’s main screen. Either way you should see something like the screen below.

Flip the switch at the bottom of the screen to “On.”

You’ll note that it’s flagged as “Experimental.” I’ll explain more tomorrow about that and what that means for future updates, but it short it’s no more likely to eat all your bookmarks or do anything else nasty than the interface with Delicious.com.

Once support has been enabled the log in screen — accessed either by logging out from Delicious or launching the app — should now have a pinboard.in option.

The rest is exactly the same as when you’re logging into a normal non-Yahoo! ID Delicious.com account.

There is one caveat to this. If you don’t have a Delicious.com account and you want to log into a pinboard.in account on first launch you may find that the option you see in the screen above is missing. This is a bug that will be fixed in Yummy 2.5.1 but there is a work around: after you’ve changed the settings, try killing Yummy from the task switching menu (double-tap home, press and hold Yummy, press the “jiggling” icon).  You should find the option available next time you launch Yummy.

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howto support tutorial

Stuck at “Refresh” when logging in?

One question that puzzles some new users is, well, the first question that Yummy asks when you launch it, namely: should I log in using my Delicious.com account or my Yahoo! ID?

May be it could have been clearer, but you should only select the Yahoo! ID option if you’ve linked your Yahoo! ID with your Delicious.com account. This will be the case if either you’ve made the link yourself or you’ve opened an account in the last few months.


If you say you have a Delicious.com account when you have a Yahoo! ID, you’ll get a message saying that your username and password was not valid.

If, on the other hand, you say you have a Yahoo! ID but your account is still accessed using your Delicious.com username and password, you get this:



Unfortunately Yummy “hangs” saying “Starting refresh…” The next version, due out in a month or so, has a fix for this (it’ll report an error, allowing you to try the other mechanism).


But that doesn’t help you right now. So what to do?


Simple. Quit Yummy by pressing the Home button and relaunch. You’ll get back to the Welcome screen and you can pick the Delicious.com option this time.


One final note: why do I ask users to make the choice? The short answer is that there is no way to determine what type of account you have without trying to log in. And when you use a Yahoo! ID the process is very different to using a Delicious.com username so I can’t just try both and see what happens.


Categories
howto tutorial

Saved Searches

I should really have written this blog post back in February last year when this was a new feature but an email from a user who couldn’t find it reminded me that I never quite got around to it.

So, you’ve probably figured out the search screen. You can enter one or more keywords in the search box at the top of the screen and select what you’re searching on at the bottom of the screen (tags, title or notes).

Perhaps not so obvious, or at least very subtle, is the fact that Yummy saves your searches. In fact, every search you make is automatically saved. But how do you get to those searches?

I used the “standard” bookmarks button but I’ll concede that it’s very small! Anyway, pressing that button leads to this screen.
Selecting the search term sends you to the search screen with that search all ready for viewing.
If you want to delete all the saved searches you can press the “Delete All” button. You can also remove individual searches by swiping it (left-to-right or vice versa) and then confirming by pressing the “Delete” button.
Categories
news support tutorial

Yummy / Yahoo! ID Screencast

Hopefully it should be pretty obvious when you get a copy in your hands (or at least on your phone), but if not here’s a short screencast showing how you can log into your Delicious.com account using your Yahoo! ID:

Categories
howto support tutorial

Bookmarking to Delicious from Twitterrific (Pt 2)

This 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.

Categories
howto support tutorial

Long Article Titles

One thing that has bothered me about Yummy for a while is the problem of very long article titles. Here’s what anonymous said about it on my UserVoice page:

Bookmark or article titles on the web can be very long… the current default size for bookmarks is too big, making it quite hard to read the full bookmark titles. I would suggest offering a font choice (see Wikiamo for a great implementation), or perhaps allowing bookmark titles to break on to a new line, in a smaller default font, and then create a gap between each bookmark block.

For those that are not familiar with it, Wikiamo has a slider control that allows you to vary the size of the text.

Some alternatives to Yummy “solve” the problem by allowing you to view your bookmarks in landscape mode. I put solve in quotes as it doesn’t really solve the problem. Sure, it allows longer titles but it doesn’t guarantee that you can see every long headline, a flaw it has in common with reducing the font size.

Instead of these partial solutions, Yummy automatically scrolls long titles (or tags if you have them). Clearly the screen would instantly become a jumble of moving text if done incorrectly. I spent a lot of time trying to get the balance right and I think it works pretty well. It defaults to waiting a couple of second and then starting scrolling. You can change the delay in the Settings application. Here’s a short video showing how it looks.

Categories
support tutorial

More on Suggest Tags

I noted a while ago that I would be making a few refinements to the way that the suggest tags feature works. This is just to belatedly note that the changes are now available in Yummy 2.2.0 and above.

In the olden days I just used the iPhone standard “bookmark” icon which in my mind seemed to adequately signify “suggest tags.” In hindsight that wasn’t my smartest move.

So now here is what the toolbar looks like when you view a bookmarks:

And here’s what it looks like when you’re editing or adding one:

I think you’ll agree that’s much more obvious.

One further thing to note, pressing the button does not overwrite any tags that are already present. Instead it merges the suggestions with what’s already there.

Categories
howto support tutorial

Instapaper Integration

Okay, so you’ve got Yummy, you’ve heard that the latest version allows you to post your bookmarks to Instapaper from Delicious for off-line reading but how do you do it?

  1. Quit Yummy
  2. Open the Settings application and select Yummy
  3. Enter your Instapaper username in the box at the top of the screen
  4. Back in Yummy you’ll now find the “Send to Instapaper” option in the “Action” button at the bottom of the bookmark and web preview screen. If you don’t have a password, then you’re done
  5. If you do have a password press the button anyway. You’ll get the opportunity to enter your password using a screen that looks a lot like this:

    The screen will check your password before proceeding so you do need to be online for this to happen
  6. When you press done, you’ll need to select the “Send to Instapaper” button again to send your link to Instapaper

Easy, eh?

Categories
support trivia tutorial

Bookmarking to Delicious from Twitterrific

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.

Categories
faq howto support tutorial

Memory Warning

By now many of you (assuming you own Yummy!) will have seen the above warning message. Why are you getting it and what does it really mean? That’s what this post hopes to answer.

The first thing to note is that the error message is being completely honest. The iPhone has told Yummy that it is running out of memory and that if nothing changes it will be shutdown without warning.

Does that not mean that Yummy is being incredibly wasteful? How could it possibly be using 8Gb of memory just to display a webpage? The answer to that is, it’s not that memory that is being depleted. In order to run programs the iPhone has around 128Mb of memory, less than 30Mb of which is available to third-party applications like Yummy. The number on the box, the 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb sizes, are a different “pot” that cannot be used for the same purpose.

So, the first thing that Yummy does when it starts running out of memory is to “forget” about as much stuff as possible that it doesn’t currently need. This means that the number of bookmarks in your Delicious account has little bearing on how much memory is used.

Jettisoning this temporary data is typically enough to allow the webpage to load. However if you’re loading a particularly large or complicated page it might not be and, unfortunately, Yummy often does not get a second warning before being forced out.

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.