Tag: wandle

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Goodbye

This is an incredibly difficult post for me to write. It is the end of an era.

Yummy hit the App Store in August 2008 and has been there ever since. Its highest grossing years were at the beginning. Initially, it was the only Delicious.com client on the App Store, and sales grew as the iPhone itself did. Sales also grew when the iPad came out, and I was able to release a version that supported its bigger screen fairly quickly. I bought my first iPad for the express purpose of making it! I didn’t expect to like it.

Over the years, I’ve released fifty-four versions of Yummy. There was also Yummy Browser, the free version. I wrote support for various URL shortening services1 for Yummy’s “share” functionality2 and hived that out into a new app called www.cut3.

I also released Rootn Tootn4, ShareEverywhere and CameraGPS5. For the Apple TV I wrote Glider, which started as an experiment to help learn Swift. To help market the apps, I wrote a “Smart App Banner” plugin for WordPress. And most recently, I wrote a calendar “widget,” which I eventually ported from the Mac6 to the iPhone and iPad7, to the Watch and then, when Apple changed the way you write widgets, back again from the Watch to the other platforms.

What I’m saying is that it’s been a busy decade. But, sadly, not a profitable one. It was never completely about the money. It was always intended to be a hobby with potential rather than my sole income. But at some point, you have to acknowledge that you don’t have the time any more and that the odds of breaking even, much less making money, are increasingly remote.

If I’m honest with myself, that point was a few years ago.

You can see where this is going.

I’m shutting down Wandle Software. This means that all the apps are no longer available to download from the App Store. I won’t be able to update or support them.

For those who have supported me over the years, I am genuinely grateful. I hope there are other apps out there that meet your needs.

  1. Remember those? ↩︎
  2. Remember when iOS didn’t have built-in share sheets? ↩︎
  3. Twelve versions ↩︎
  4. Ten versions ↩︎
  5. Six versions ↩︎
  6. Five versions ↩︎
  7. Nine versions ↩︎
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Wandle Software: Year Three

Wandle Software is now about three years old. I say “about” because the filing of the paper-work and then Apple taking notice took a while, so the exact date gets a bit blurry. In any case it’s around this time of year and we’ve just had a very big WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, so I thought that it would be a good time to discuss what I’m hoping we’ll see in the next year or so.

As ever, what I’m going to talk about here are less plans and more ambitions. There are no dates attached to anything and I’m not making any commitments.

Changes mostly come in two categories: things that I was planning on anyway and things that become possible because of new features in iOS 8.

CameraGPS

First, because it’s the closest to being finish, is CameraGPS version 1.1. This is the first feature update to CameraGPS, adding a few features that I wanted to put in version 1.0 but never quite got the time. This will hopefully come out very soon and I’ll discuss the new features then.

Beyond that, iOS 8 has changes to both CoreLocation (how it gets the GPS coordinates) and allows third party Cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, to “plug in” to other apps. It’s unclear to me at the time how either of these changes will affect CameraGPS but there will likely be an iOS 8 update if only to assure compatibility.

Rootn Tootn

At least one of the changes in iOS 8 comes a bit too late for Rootn Tootn. iOS 8 finally has support for the background blur effect meaning that I wouldn’t have had to implement it myself for version 2.0!

As it happens, of course, I did and I don’t plan on dropping iOS 7 support just so I can use the new and easy way of doing the same thing in iOS 8.

In short, I don’t currently see any iOS 8 features that it needs but I am in the early stages of planning another feature release. This may or not make it out this year.

Yummy

One of the big new features of iOS 8 is “extensions,” or the ability for one app to talk directly to another. Since Yummy 1.0 in 2008 I have been waiting for a way to better allow adding a bookmark from Safari. In fact, this has been the number one source of poor reviews and features requests. The fact that I have not been able to do anything about it has been frustrating to say the least!

So it won’t come as a surprise to hear that I fully intend to support an extension to do exactly that. I am still experimenting to find out what I can do, but support will emerge in some form.

For the past few months I have been working on Yummy 3.0, a substantial update that takes advantage of the vast performance increase of devices released since Yummy 2.0 first came out at the beginning of 2009. Any new iOS 8 features will be in that and not the current 2.x versions. I’m yet to decide the “business” side (pricing or availability) or the minimum supported version (one possibility is to make it iOS 8 only).

www.cut

Like Yummy, www.cut may be able to make use of the new extension mechanism. I will add that support if it makes sense.

Other

There is also the possibility of a couple of new apps. First is a small, utility app made possible by iOS 8. Second would be in collaboration with anther company and may or may not be under the Wandle name. Either way, you’ll hear about it here if it happens.

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Wandle and iOS 7

September 2013 Invitation

Tomorrow Apple are expected to announce a — or possibly more than one — new iPhone, likely along with the date that iOS 7 will be made available for the rest of us. I thought that made this a good time to talk about what can expect from Wandle Software.

Short version: updates are coming but probably not for day one.

Due to the changes that Apple have made with iOS 7 it’s difficult to make an app that is fully optimised for both iOS 7 and earlier. What we’re aiming for with each update is works with iOS 6, works and looks best with iOS 7.

I want to be clear about two points about this. Firstly, if you’re using iOS 4 or 5 then you’re most likely not going to get any further updates. With very few exceptions, devices that are still in use are capable of running iOS 6. If you’ve not updated yet for some reason, now is the time! Of course, older version of our apps won’t suddenly just stop working.

Secondly, “works best” in iOS 7 might mean some aspects might not look quite as good in iOS 6. Everything will be functional and I’m certainly not deliberately degrading the look.

Updates for all three apps, Rootn Tootn, Yummy and www.cut, will all be coming out over the next month or two. (For what it’s worth, Rootn Tootn is currently the closest to release, www.cut the furthest. I believe all current versions work in iOS 7 without further updates.)

More updates when new versions have been submitted to Apple for review.

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Now more Wandle-y

You’ll notice a change wherever your usual destination is.

I have merged the previously separate Wandle Software and the Yummyapp websites. It’s basically the old Yummy website with extra content, covering details about www.cut and Wandle, the company.

You should find the same (or more) content but if you find anything missing, please let me know. I’ll do what I can to put it back again.