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news

The future of Yummy

Back in March I wrote about a Delicious API outage. I assumed that it was a short term problem caused by them moving web hosts. But it’s now July and the service is still not back, meaning that users of Yummy and other third party clients still see no error and no bookmarks. (Actually, it’s worse than that: half the web site seems to be broken, with dead images and links abound. I think the whole endeavour is over.)

At this point I see no point in maintaining Delicious support in Yummy. When you consider that the app is named after the site this feels a little crazy but pretending that Yummy supports Delicious when it can’t is starting to feel dishonest, even though this is not a problem of my making.

Because of this, I will shortly be sending an update to Apple that disables Delicious support. After this, it will only sync with Pinboard.in.

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news

Preview: Yummy 3.0

Where to start with introducing Yummy 3.0? It’s pretty much a ground-up rewrite of our full-features Delicious and Pinboard.in client, designed with modern Apple hardware and the latest version of iOS in mind. That’s to say, it has all the features that you rely on but it works even better than before.

I’m generally of the opinion that you shouldn’t rewrite working software. However, Yummy 2 (“still the only Delicious.com client for iPhone and iPod touch that allows you to edit bookmarks”), released in January 2009, was designed for the original iPhone. The original iPhone had 128Mb memory and single, slow CPU core. Modern iPads have three fast, 64-bit cores, 2Gb of memory, Retina displays… there’s so little in common that it’s amazing that Yummy still works at all!

It became pretty much impossible to to migrate the architecture from this old world to the new one without rewriting the database, the sync engine and much of the UI. But those three things are the app. If those things change beyond recognition, there wouldn’t be much of the original left anyway.

Of course, there’s no point in just moving forward technically. There has to be something in it for people other than me. I think you’ll like what’s there.

The two big new features are multi-account support and full text support.

Previously Yummy worked with both Delicious and Pinboard, but not at the same time. Now you can be logged into many accounts at the same time, browsing and searching across all of them. (My concerns about adding this in the past — performance — are still present but with modern hardware the bar is so high that most people will never find it.)

In Yummy 2.x you could search your tags, bookmark titles or description, but you could search for the occurrence of a word in any of those three fields. Yummy 3.0 breaks that limit. It has “full text search,” meaning that it looks anywhere to find a match.

Of course, there’s lot more but I’ll leave some of those details for later.

Yummy 3 is nearly ready for release. It is feature complete with some finesse and bug fixing left before release. If you’d like to help, please let me know and I will add you to the beta testing list.

Categories
support

Stacks

I’ve had a few queries about this, both by email and UserVoice. I’ve responded on Twitter already but I just realised that I’ve not said anything here.

For those that are not familiar with them, recently Delicious added a new feature where you can bundle a bunch of links together in a Stack. This, I suppose, has a similar use-case to Tag Bundles but rather than grouping bookmarks automatically using tags, you manually add them to a Stack.

It seems that they are a popular new feature.

Unfortunately, and the reason that they’re not in Yummy, is that they have not yet provided developer support for Stacks. There is no way that Yummy, or indeed any third party client, can request the information from Delicious.

If you would like to see Stacks in Yummy, I would suggest that you ask Delicious to allow API access to Stacks. While I can’t say how long it would take to implement and release, I can say that it’s a feature that I would like to see in Yummy myself.