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Yummy 3.4.1

There are three things in this release: a fix, an improvement and a new feature.

The most visible change is that Yummy 3.4.1 supports Dark Mode.

Yummy: Dark mode
Yummy: Dark mode

For most screens, this is supported automatically. There is one exception: the bookmark list view. In the olden days — that is in 3.4.0 and earlier — you could switch between having a white, green, red or blue background to help distinguish between accounts. This option is still present and is unchanged in the new version. If you want to use automatic dark mode, go into the settings screen and switch the background colour to “Default.”

The fix is for the tip jar feature, which was broken in 3.4.0. I have not changed any code. Submitting a new version will allow Apple to review it properly which, for reasons unknown, they didn’t last time.

In iOS and iPadOS 14 there’s a new notification when an app programmatically “pastes” from the clipboard. Earlier versions of Yummy had a coding error. The logic looks like this:

Get contents of clipboard
If “copy URL from clipboard” is enabled and the thing on the clipboard is a URL then

  Present “New bookmark” screen


I’m spelling it out like this because I want to be clear that nothing nefarious was going on. Anyway, the new version improves that logic by only reading the clipboard after checking that the “copy URL from clipboard” option is enabled.

If “copy URL from clipboard” is enabled then

  Get contents of clipboard
 
  if the thing on the clipboard is a URL then

    Present “New bookmark” screen


In order to effectively support dark mode, the minimum supported version is now iOS and iPadOS 13.0. I appreciate that this is a big jump since 3.3.x but most users are already on newer versions.

The update is now with Apple and should be available to download shortly. Enjoy.

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news

Yummy 3.4

Despite its public image as an engineering discipline, there’s an awful lot of art in writing software. As with any art, there’s often a lot of experimentation and not all of it pays off.

New shortcut menuIt’s been eighteen months since the last release of Yummy and, while you might have concluded that it is no longer being maintained, the truth is mostly there in the first paragraph.

Yummy 3.4 is both less and more than it was originally intended. Many new features ended up on the cutting room floor. Some were good ideas that just didn’t work well. Some turned out not to be possible. Some were too ambitious. Some will hopefully return, others will not.

Saved searchAnyway, it’s now with Apple and should be on your device shortly. Here’s what you can expect.

  • Full-text search, multi-account support and site status checks now come as standard for everyone!
  • Instead of the upgrade for the “pro” features, we now have a “tip jar.” While there’s no obligation to contribute, if you’d like to recognise the longevity of Yummy and the fact that there have been over forty free updates across a dozen versions of iOS, now you can
  • Slightly tweaked visuals, fitting in with modern iOS conventions better
  • A “Popular Links” widget for Notification Centre
  • Type multiple tags in the share extension
  • Removal of 3D-touch support, replaced with the iOS13-standard long-press shortcut menus
  • Support for all the recent iPhone and iPad devices

There are also some “behind the scenes” changes that you shouldn’t notice but you never know.

  • Yummy now no longer stores your password. It used to be stored in the iOS KeyChain, a place that Apple provides for just this kind of thing. It’s secure and Wandle Software has never had access to it. Now, Yummy doesn’t even store it. Instead, Yummy converts it into an API token and stores that instead (also in the keychain). You can also enter the API token directly if you prefer. If you logged in using a previous version, Yummy converts your password into a token and deletes your password from your device
  • Experimental support for “low data mode.” In short, if enabled Yummy no longer does site status checks and other high-bandwidth activities

The minimum supported version of iOS is now 11.4.

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news

Yummy 3.3.3

You’ll find a new version of Yummy on the App Store. It’s one of the usual “fixes and minor improvements” releases.

There (should be) no user-visible change… except if you have one of the recently released Apple devices with new screen sizes. In that case, you’ll find that Yummy now knows about the whole screen!

In the meantime, I’m continuing to work on Yummy 3.4 that will have some more substantial changes.

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news

Yummy 3.3.2

So here’s the last “tidy things up before the new version of iOS comes out” update for Yummy. The changes are mostly fixes for things reported by users:

  • Refresh tags on edit tag screen when they arrive from Pinboard after the screen appears (#43)
  • Fix for handover not working when using Safari View Controller (#46)
  • Always show title/url in browser view (#48)
  • Open in Safari and Chrome actions for browsers (#47)

(The last one is kind of a new feature but, oddly, one I thought Yummy already had. Not sure if I imaged it or I accidentally removed it at some point. Anyway… the point is… it’s there now.)

A quick explanation for the wording in the last one: yes, it says browsers (plural). Yummy has two. On the iPhone it uses something called Safari View Controller mostly. This is nice because it shares cookies and other niceties with the main Safari browser. Sadly, you can’t really embed it as part of a screen (like on an iPad) and you can’t edit the URL once you’ve displayed it (like a browser), so Yummy also has its own screen. If you want to play spot-the-difference, the Safari View Controller has a “Safari” button on the bottom right.

I submitted it to Apple today and it should be available soon. Keep an eye out for it!

Update: there’s a snag with App Review so this is taking longer than anticipated.

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news

Yummy 3.3.1

Not a super-exciting update unless you’ve been affected by any of the bugs that have been fixed or notice any of the performance improvements. Yes, it’s one of those “bug fixes and misc improvements” updates. But it’s none of the worse for it.

Of the user visible issues, the two most interesting changes are:

  • Saving a bookmark using the share extension from apps other than Safari now works again. (This slipped through because, personally, I use Safari and the “title” field is a mandatory field in Pinboard but not Delicious. Ah, the good old days of when Delicious was a thing.) Many thanks to the user who reported this.
  • An occasional crash during sync has been squashed. I’ve been trying to find and fix this bug since early in the 3.x development cycle so it makes me really happy to have got to the bottom of it!

Anyway, this is almost certainly the best ever release of Yummy. Enjoy!

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support

iOS 11, macOS High Sierra and our apps

At this time of year I get the same questions: do Wandle Software’s apps work on the new version of iOS and do you intend to support its new features? 2017 is no exception, so here’s the news about iOS 11.

As far as I know, all our apps will continue to work correctly on iOS 11. In slightly more detail:

  • Yummy. There appear to be some visual glitches that are caused by some changes, but functionality is unaffected. I’ll issue an update to fix the glitch when I’ve figured out what’s causing it. I also plan to support improved drop and drop support, though maybe not with that first version.
  • Quick Calendar. Designed with iOS 11 in mind. I’ve not seen any problems with the Mac version.
  • ShareEverywhere. With the exception of Facebook and Twitter, it should continue to work as before. iOS 11 removes the system level sharers for Facebook and Twitter, and these are what ShareEverywhere uses. I’m currently not clear whether this functionality can be easily restored.
  • Rootn Tootn. I’ve tested and seen no problems. I’ll keep an eye out when the Golden Master is available.
  • www.cut. I’ve tested and seen no problems. On iPad, it even supports the drag-and-drop functionality.
  • Glider. I’ve not tested the beta version of tvOS yet so I’m not sure. However, I do not anticipate any problems and will fix them if I find anything.

The summary: minor fixes, some minor updates. While both new operating systems have some nice new features, they don’t really affect Wandle’s apps.

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news

Yummy 3.2.2

A new version of Yummy is on the way to the App Store.

Sadly, this version removes support for syncing with Delicious.com. The Delicious API has been broken since March so it feels dishonest to claim support when we’re not able to. I apologise if you’re affected by this change but I’m afraid it’s outside our control. Please contact Delicious if you would like to bring back this functionality.

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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

Yummy 3.0.1

Yummy 3 was a massive update. It was effectively a completely new app with very little shared with the version that it replaced. Inevitably, sadly, some bugs made it through into the finished version, despite lots of testing by myself and the largest number of beta testers I’ve ever had for a new app. (Please let me know if you’d like to be added to the beta list.)

iOS Simulator Screen Shot 13 Mar 2015 12.16.41
Yummy 3: Tag list view

Version 3.0.1 is all about resolving as many of those issues are possible:

  • Fixed a bunch of crashing bugs. Most were pretty obscure, happening rarely to a small number of users, but that’s no excuse. A better excuse is that I wasn’t able to reproduce most of them so the fixes are somewhat speculative.
  • Performance improvements. The slowest thing in Yummy (all versions) is dealing with tags. I’ve made it quite a lot quicker, though you’ll likely only really notice during the initial sync or when migrating from Yummy 2.
  • Fix the add bookmark functionality. This was the most embarrassing bug to make it into the final version.
  • Fixes and performance improvements to the migration from Yummy 2. This should fix the syncing and share extension troubles that some users have been experiencing. There is a workaround.
  • Workaround for a bug in Pocket that meant that you couldn’t save bookmarks using Yummy’s share extension.
  • Improvements to “get webpage title” functionality.
  • Dismiss keyboard when saving a bookmark.
  • A new alternative to the “tag cloud” screen, which looks pretty much the same as the tag screen in Yummy 2, including the count of bookmarks.
  • Updates to the versions of a number of open source components used.

I don’t normally include this much detail when talking about bug fix updates but I think it’s important to detail what’s going on this time.

I’m sorry if you’ve been affected by any of the bugs and I hope this release makes Yummy more usable again. Thank you to the users who submitted crash reports or emailed me with their thoughts or observations. As the App Store description notes: I can’t fix problems I don’t know about.

Yummy 3.0.1 is currently with Apple for review. It should be out soon.

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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.