Wandle SoftwareI have just submitted a small update to Yummy that is currently with Apple and will, hopefully, be released some time in the next week.
It has a single bug fix: if you leave the app when you’re on the tags screen Yummy will sometimes crash. This should never have resulted in data loss so, while I never like to release crashing code, I would hazard that most people never noticed.
Update: Yummy was approved on the 4th December, pretty much in record time — thank you Apple!
You may have noticed some changes on the App Store last week:
Apple has increased the prices of apps sold through its iTunes App Store in Europe because of exchange rate changes, it said on Friday. The minimum price for an app in the Euro zone rose to €0.89 ($1.15) from €0.79.
That means that the following prices apply to our apps:
In a handful of other countries you can also pay in your local currency rather than US Dollars.
In my rush to get Yummy 2.7.1 out I missed a couple of things: one feature and one bug. I fixed that in 2.7.2 and added a small bonus.
The bug I have already written about on Twitter. Basically, if you are still running iOS 5 but do not have Twitter enabled then Yummy is liable to crash when you open a bookmark or the web preview screen. While Apple approve the real fix, if you enable Twitter support (even if you don’t use it) you can work around the problem.
Secondly, in using the new iOS 6 share sheets, I accidentally removed the “Open in Safari” option. In 2.7.2 that’s back. As is a new option, allowing you to open links in Google’s Chrome, too.
With luck this will hit the App Store some time in the next week.
Update (12 October 2012): Yummy 2.7.2. was approved last night and it available for download now.
I have just submitted an update to Yummy to Apple for review. Hopefully it should make it to the App Store some time in the next week. As with the recent updates to Rootn Tootn and www.cut, this revision is all about supporting iOS 6 and the new screen size on the iPhone 5 and fifth generation iPod touch.
The changes for Yummy were both more difficult and more extensive, much bigger than you might expect given the 0.0.1 version number increment. The “harder” I’m sure you don’t care about but the “more extensive” I hope you do. The most visible change is that the three little buttons at the bottom of the bookmark and web preview screens are gone, replaced with the iOS 6 standard “Activity View.” It looks like the attached picture.
The options available will depend on your device, but it should be the same or better than before.
(A quick aside to answer a question that I’ve been asked a few times now: no, I can’t add Yummy to the Activity view of other applications.)
Yummy 2.7 allowed you to use the new, built-in-to-iOS post-to-Twitter functionality. Yummy 2.7.1 extends that to the new post-to-Facebook dialog. You’ll find that the “Log into Facebook” button is no longer in the Settings screen. Instead you’ll need to configure the system-wide Facebook settings.
If you’re not running iOS 6 yet, things will mostly work as before.
However, there may be some Yummy users who will not be able to take advantage of these new features.
In order to build in any iOS 6 functionality I had to use the most up-to-date developer tools from Apple. This has meant dropping support for devices running versions of iOS less than 4.3. In practice this means all original iPhones, all iPhone 3G’s (not the 3GS which does support iOS 6) and their equivalent iPod touches. As I said last month, I am sorry if this affects you but there is nothing I can do if I am to keep Yummy current. Of course, version 2.7 won’t suddenly stop working.
The other casualty is Facebook support in devices that are not running iOS 6. This was a decision made more out of practicality than necessity. The post-to-Facebook functionality has taken a disproportionate amount of time to maintain compared with its utility or usage. By switching to the built-in functionality I can spend more time on more unique and useful features. The main device that this affects is the original iPad, though there may be others.
All software involves trade-offs but I think Yummy 2.7.1 will be a big improvement for the vast majority of users. I hope you like it.
Update 1 October, 2012: Apple just approved the update. It should be available on the App Store shortly.
I’ve been looking at the new version of iOS, trying to figure out what it means for Wandle’s apps. There’s only so much that I can say publicly at the moment, since the details are still covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but I think enough of the “interesting” bits were shown at the keynote that it’s worth jotting some notes.
iOS5, launched last year, was big. You’ll probably remember the Notification Center and the Twitter integration. But there were also lots of neat new technical things “under the hood” that I was keen to use as soon as possible. So much so that I re-wrote www.cut using them and Rootn Tootn is iOS5-only too. (For various technical reasons that I won’t bore you with, I didn’t extensively update Yummy in the same way.) iOS6 is not like that. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice improvements, but little that I feel the need to integrate right now.
“Little” is, of course, not “nothing.” There is one part of Yummy and www.cut that is third party software, is not terribly reliable and is really difficult to keep up with technically. That’s the Facebook integration. As you may have heard, iOS6 has Facebook built-in. So what I plan to do is remove the Facebook API and just use the one included in iOS.
The good news: it should work much better, it will be more reliable and you’ll no longer need to log in separately.
The bad news: unless you’re using iOS6 you will lose this functionality.
As far as I can tell (looking at the crash reports) there are very few people who won’t be able to run iOS6. The main “victims” will be owners of the original iPad. If it’s any consolation, that includes me…
I’ve mentioned this a couple of times in passing now, but I’m not sure if I’ve really made clear how cool this little feature is.
Delicious has recently added a neat new feature where you can import all the bookmarks that you Tweet. That’s great. What’s not so great is that when using the API — the thing that Yummy uses to get your bookmarks — the titles are all missing. It looks like this:
I’ve checked two of Yummy’s competitors, and they do exactly the same thing.
But in Yummy (version 2.6.6 and later), the same bookmarks look like this:
I hesitate to shout too loudly because it’s covering up a defect in someone else’s code but it’s just so useful that I couldn’t help myself this one time.
I have just sent an update to Apple for review. It’s not one of the bigger releases ever but there’s some nice new stuff that I thought was well worth releasing:
The main new feature is the web browser. It’s limited in some respects but for people who are frustrated that it’s not possible to put a “Add to Delicious” button directly in Safari (if you want this functionality, please ask Apple) it may be a convenient option.
You can find the option in the middle of the main menu screen.
The Twitter functionality is not so much new functionality as a change. Yummy will use iOS5’s built-in Twitter client rather than its own if it’s present and configured. The advantage is that you can now post to multiple Twitter accounts and you only have to configure your Twitter settings once. If you’re still using an older version of iOS you won’t notice anything different.
Finally, I have restored the ability to run Yummy on iOS 3.1.3 which was accidentally removed in the last version. This is just a temporary reprieve, though. Apple’s most recent developer tools no longer support anything older than iOS 4.3 which means that soon I will have no choice but to set that as the minimum version supported by Yummy.
Still, this is a great new release to run on your five year old phone!
A week later than I had originally planned, but here is another app update that has been submitted to Apple for approval. In some ways it’s a bigger update than the 0.0.1 increment might lead you to believe. But let’s start with the user-visible changes:
The second item has pretty much the same caveats I mentioned in www.cut 3.1: it’s designed to be quicker than the functionality it replaces, though it is sometimes less accurate. That is, websites that do “clever” things with the title, such as using frames (1996 called…) or updating with Java Script after the initial load, may well fail. But overall I think the speed-gain is a net win.
The greater performance made one extra feature possible. Last month I mentioned a flaw in Delicious’ new “get links from Twitter” functionality. Namely, that those bookmarks when pulled into Yummy lack the website title. (As a quick aside, it’s only because of what’s arguably a bug in Yummy that these bookmarks could be saved at all. Normally the title is a mandatory field.)
In Yummy 2.6.6, if, when downloading a bookmark, it finds that the title is missing it uses the new “Get title” feature to populate the field as you’d expect.
Three small points: if the bookmark has already been downloaded then Yummy will not go back and get the title. You can do this manually (press ‘Edit’, then ‘Get title’ and finally ‘Done’) or, if you have a lot of them, as I did, then you can simply log out and log back in again.
Secondly, the title does not come from Delicious, so I can’t guarantee that it will be the same. It should be most of the time, but if they differ it’s (probably) not a bug.
Thirdly, Yummy gets the titles after finishing its normal sync process. There is (currently) no status update posted on the main screen but you can see that’s it’s working because the “network activity” spinner in the status bar will be going.
If you don’t like this functionality (or it causes problems for some reason) I added a setting to disable it.
Keep an eye on Twitter (or the available updates in the App Store) for when it makes it out of Cupertino.
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.
You may have seen the new feature by Delicious that allows you to save all the links that you tweet. Neat idea, right?
Slightly flawed implementation, unfortunately. For the moment, if you’re a heavy Yummy user, you may be as well not enabling this option.
The problem is that while all the links get saved they don’t include their title; the tweet is included in the notes field, but the title is empty. (When pinboard.in do the same thing, they put the website name as the title and the tweet as the notes.) To be more specific, you can see the title on the website but they are not present in the API, which is how Yummy accesses all your bookmarks.
This does not cause any technical problems. Your bookmarks sync correctly. It just makes it a bit tricky to find them again since the don’t have a title.
I am looking a ways to improve the situation in Yummy — it already includes the ability to fetch a bookmarks title but it only works one link at a time — but hopefully the new team at Delicious might fix things first. Watch this space.