Yummy

Roadmap (Early 2010)

2010-03-02T20:20:00.000Z

Since there has been little visible activity here for the last month or two, I thought it might be a good time to let you know what's happening with Yummy and where things are heading.

In short the next version is nearing completion and I hope to send it to Apple in the next couple of weeks. I'm not going to talk about features in this post but one thing that I would like to mention is that version 2.4 will be the first release to require iPhone OS 3.x. Until now Yummy has run on all version of iPhone OS that have the App Store (i.e., 2.0 and above), but the new OS has been out long enough and there are so few users of older versions that I think it's time to make the jump.

Release 2.4 has a bit of a checkered history. I originally hoped to make it available before the end of last year but then Yahoo! threw a spanner in the works and I had to spend a lot of time writing code to support the new Yahoo! ID log in scheme. I figured that not doing this would put me at a big disadvantage when my competitors updated but so far Yummy remains the only Delicious client on the iPhone that supports the new log in scheme.

I also spent an unusually large amount of time working on features that never made it into the shipping version. This always happens to some degree, but one "biggie" ended up being discarded and another was repurposed. This meant that a couple of other features ended up being pushed out of this release altogether.

However, all the work on the Yahoo! ID scheme meant that another feature, one planned for version 3 or later, became much easier and was therefore brought forward to this release.

I know I'm teasing a bit here. Details will follow shortly.

At the same time I am also progressing an update to www.cut, my quick URL shortening app. This was originally to be a minor update due before Yummy 2.4 but is likely to make it out shortly afterwards, hopefully before the end of March.

Next, like many other iPhone developers I have been looking at the recently announced iPad and wondering how well my applications would work on it. To be clear, Yummy should work just fine as it is but I'm curious if there are ways that I can make better use of the increased screen real-estate.

In short I think there is but the current UI will need to be rewritten. If I go down that route I want it to be a proper iPad application and not just a quick hack.

To that end, I have just started work on Yummy 3.0. This is a complete, ground-up re-write with some new ideas and a new approach to managing your delicious.com bookmarks. At this stage it's more sketching thing out on paper and prototyping small pieces of code than hard-core development but some ideas are staring to take shape.

It's at such an early stage that I'm not going to make any estimates as to when you might expect to see it. It is likely be a while, so there will be more point releases in the 2.x line.

So, in summary, there will be a few updates to look out for in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Stuck at "Refresh" when logging in?

2010-02-10T22:36:00.000Z

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.

Saved Searches

2010-01-06T20:18:00.000Z

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.

Yummy 2.3.3 Approved

2009-12-31T19:58:00.000Z

It was looking as though this might actually get approved before Christmas but in fact it only hit the App Store late last night (UK time). Or put another way, only hours after I grumbled how long it was taking!

This is a minor update -- only a few lines of code -- that fixes an annoying problem that I wrote about earlier.

In summary:

No longer goes to login screen when you press the "Suggest Tags" button. This only ever affected people who use their Yahoo! ID to log in

As ever, please let me know if you have problems. And I'm still working on the next major version. You can make new feature suggestions on my UserVoice page.

Suggest Tags in Yummy 2.3.2

2009-12-19T17:20:00.000Z

A user told me that they were thrown back to the log in page whenever they pressed the "Suggest Tags" option when adding a new bookmark. Fortunately this won't affect most users and many web pages, but there is a bug there and I will fix it as soon as I can. Read on for more details and what to do it if happens to you.

So, first, how does it happen? The underlying cause is a bit technical, but you'll need to be logged in using your Yahoo! ID -- it does not affect the vast majority of users who have a username and password -- and you'll need to be saving a URL with various "odd" characters in it. Sometimes it won't fail as such, but will return suggested tags for a slightly different page.

When Yummy talks to Yahoo! to get the suggested bookmarks, the response that comes back looks indistinguishable from the one that comes back when you're not authorised. So it opens the Log In screen.

At this point you don't need to log in again, although it won't do any harm if you do. Instead quit out of Yummy and relaunch. Your bookmark should still be there and you should still be authenticated.

Thanks to the user in question for contacting me about this and apologies to anyone who is affected by this. As I mentioned above, I'll get a fix out for this as soon as I can.

Yummy / Yahoo! ID Screencast

2009-12-16T20:31:00.001Z

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:

Yahoo! ID FAQ

2009-12-15T20:15:00.002Z

So I can log in now using my Yahoo! ID?

You log into Yummy using the same process you use to log into the Delicious.com website. If you have one of the original accounts -- and the vast majority of people do -- you need to log in using your username and password as before. If you have a new account, most likely one opened since October, then you probably have a Yahoo! ID and should use the new scheme.

I'm afraid that your Delicious username and your Yahoo! ID are not interchangeable. Only one will actually let you into your account; the other will say that your credentials are incorrect. Unfortunately without (potentially) asking you to enter your details more than once it's not possible for Yummy to figure out which scheme you use. This is a limitation imposed by Yahoo! I'm open to ideas of how to make it simpler.

I have the option to migrate my Delicious.com account from using a username and password to using a Yahoo! ID. Should I make the change?

Yummy should work with the new scheme without any problems. However there are still a few reasons that you might want to stay with the "old" authentication scheme.

First, not all Delicious.com clients work with Yahoo! ID yet. If you use a desktop client as well as Yummy you'll need to make sure it works too.

Also, if you have multiple accounts and switch between them you might want to think about how you migrate them. Do you need multiple Yahoo! accounts?

Having said that, it's clear that Yahoo! plan on migrating all users sooner or later.

The login process takes you out of Yummy and into Safari. Why not just use a built-in web view?

The first point to make is that you only need to do this once, so, while it is a bit of a hassle, it's not something you need to do very often.

As for why, the weak reason is that this is what Yahoo! recommends.

The real reason is that it's all about trust. If Yummy brings up a web view you then have no idea what it's doing in the background. If, on the other hand, it sends you to Safari, an application that you know and trust, then the idea is that your credentials are in much safer hands.

You could argue that you already had to trust Yummy. However, this time you're entering your Yahoo! ID which also gives access to your Mail, Flickr and the many other services that Yahoo! provide. The Yahoo! ID mechanism only gives Yummy permission to access the resource you tell it to. I can tell you that I'm not using your password for nefarious means and you can just trust me, or you can just not give me the details in the first place.

When I log in using a Yahoo! ID it seems a bit slower than before.

Approximately once an hour Yummy has to go back to Yahoo! and ask to be authorised again. This is all automated and behind the scenes; there is no need to enter your password again. This means that your initial refresh may take a little longer than before but everything else should be about the same or quicker.

I've changed my Yahoo! password. Where do I make the change in Yummy?

One of the nice things about the new method of logging in is that Yummy no longer has a copy of your password and so it never needs updating, even if you change it.

How do I stop Yummy accessing my Delicous.com account?

You can log out of your account by pressing the new "Logout" option in the main menu of Yummy.

You can also "force" the issue by withdrawing permission from the Yahoo! website. When you first connect Yummy to Delicious.com you'll get an email with instructions and a link that explain how to do this. (The link provides a unique reference so I can't include it here.)

If you have any other questions, please ask in the comments below.

Yummy and Yummy Browser 2.3.2 Approved

2009-12-14T19:50:00.000Z

In pretty much record time, Apple have approved the latest version of Yummy and Yummy Browser.

Just to refresh your memory, it has the following changes:

Yummy now works with newer Delicious.com accounts where you use Yahoo! ID to log in
Bug fix where Yummy would occasionally display bookmarks in the wrong date
Added support for kl.am and cut.hut URL shorteners (not Yummy Browser)
Added BirdFeed support (not Yummy Browser)
Other minor bug fixed

Both Yummy and Yummy Browser are available in iTunes now as a free download for people who already have a copy. If you're not seeing it please make sure you have iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.

Yummy Browser 2.3.2 Submitted

2009-12-10T20:41:00.002Z

I have also submitted Yummy Browser 2.3.2 to Apple for review. Apple say that 92% of updates are approved within 14 days, let's hope that we see it on the App Store this side of Christmas!

This update has the following changes:

Yummy now works with newer Delicious.com accounts where you use Yahoo! ID to log in
Bug fix where Yummy would occasionally display bookmarks in the wrong date
Other minor bug fixed

As with the full version of Yummy, this one now requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 as a minimum. This change should not affect anyone.

Yummy 2.3.2 Submitted

2009-12-09T20:07:00.001Z

I have submitted Yummy 2.3.2 to Apple for review. Hopefully it will be available on the App Store shortly. Apple say that 92% of updates are approved within 14 days, let's hope this is one of them!

This update has the following changes:

Yummy now works with newer Delicious.com accounts where you use Yahoo! ID to log in
Bug fix where Yummy would occasionally display bookmarks in the wrong date
Added support for kl.am and cut.hut URL shorteners
Added BirdFeed support
Other minor bug fixed

In terms of lines of code, this is actually a significant update though most users will hopefully not notice. Another thing that I hope no one will notice is that the minimum version of iPhone has changed. Now you'll need iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.

Bookmarking to Delicious from Twitterrific (Pt 2)

2009-12-02T17:05:00.000Z

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.

Yahoo! ID Login Update

2009-11-12T20:37:00.001Z

It's been a while since I last mentioned some recent changes with the way new Delicious.com users log into system so I thought it was time for an update.

In short, I am in the late stages of implementing this change and should be submitting to Apple soon afterwards. Apple say that 75% of apps are approved within two weeks currently. If you are unable to use Yummy at the moment and would be willing to beta test an early version, please let me know.

You may be asking yourself, it's just the login screen -- just one lousy screen -- why is this taking so long?

Good question.

I'm sure you don't care about what goes on "under the hood" so let's just think about the user interface. The log in screen in Yummy 2.3.1 looks like this:

You enter your Delicious.com username and password, it validates them and downloads your bookmarks. Easy.

This is not how the new Yahoo! ID scheme works. Instead what happens is that you get sent to a Yahoo! web page where you enter your username and password and then get send back to the application, in this case Yummy. At no point does Yummy ever actually see either your username or password. There is all kinds of clever stuff going on behind the scenes, including cryptographic hashes and digital signatures, to make this happen. If you're interested in the details it's called OAuth.

That's to say that it's not just a matter of taking your credentials and asking Yahoo! to check them, which is how it works with the old system.

And then, every time you want to talk to Delicious.com Yummy has to make sure that you are still entitled to talk to Delicious.com.

But even that is not all.

Yahoo! didn't just replace their old scheme with the new one. Instead some users need to use the old scheme and others need this new Yahoo! ID method. So firstly I have to make all of Yummy work with both methods and then I have to make a user interface where you can either enter a user name or do the Yahoo! OAuth shuffle. But not both for the same user. And try not to make users have to enter the same information twice. I mean how annoying would it be to enter your Yahoo! user name only to be told that you had to enter the same information again a minute later? This only happens once, but it's your first impression of Yummy.

So if you're stuck with a copy of Yummy that you're unable to use because you have a Yahoo! ID, I apologise for the wait but this is a big and unplanned change. But the good news is that an updated version should be available shortly.

Yahoo! ID Login

2009-10-24T15:16:00.000+01:00

I have just learned that Yahoo! have just made a significant change to the way that new users are required to sign into Delicious.com.

In short, new users need to log in using their Yahoo ID rather than a username and password that is unique to Delicious.com. Unfortunately they also changed the way that third-party clients, such as Yummy, need to authenticate users.

This means that if you have one of these new Yahoo! ID Delicious.com accounts, you will not be able to log in to your account with Yummy. I am working as fast as I can to provide an update that will work, but the new scheme is not adequately documented and there's still the App Store review process gauntlet that needs to be tackled. This means that even if everything goes well it could be a couple of weeks before an update is downloadable.

If you're an existing user I have better news: Yummy will continue to work. But if you are given the option to "upgrade" your account to use a Yahoo! ID, please say "no" until you have an updated version of Yummy.

My apologies if you are affected by this change but, unfortunately, it is entirely outside my control. Yahoo! provided no advanced notice which is frustrating to say the least. I would imagine that most other third party developers have also been affected.

Yummy 2.3.1

2009-09-01T21:36:00.000+01:00

There's a new release of Yummy on its way to your iPhone or iPod touch. It's a minor release and contains the following three changes:

Fix occasional keychain error on sending bookmarks to Instapaper and Read It Later
Fix send to Twitter with no shortening service enabled
Add tinyurl and to.ly support

I added the last item when it looked as though tr.im support was going to be very short-lived! None of these affect Yummy Browser so that stays on version 2.3.0.

www.cut

2009-08-31T20:17:00.001+01:00

This isn't directly Yummy related but I thought you might be interested. I have just launched a new, free iPhone application, called www.cut. It uses a bunch of code that's already in Yummy but also has a number of its own tricks. Find the description below and its web page is here.

This isn't one of those immersive applications that takes hours to figure out and weeks to master. Instead it's a small but useful utility that shortens URLs for you so that they can be emailed, Twittered or Facebooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks messing up the link.

www.cut -- we like to pronounce it "dub cut" -- keeps out of your way as much as possible. For example, if there's a URL on the clipboard when it starts it assumes that's the one you want to use and immediately asks your configured shortening service to begin its work. When complete it automatically sends it straight back to the clipboard, so you might not even have to press a single button!

Of course you can also type the URL manually. If you want to email a message you can do it without leaving www.cut.

www.cut currently supports six shortening services:

The ones that support it allow you to log in so that statistics about your links can be gathered.

Simple but effective. That's www.cut.

Half Price Promotion

2009-08-29T14:47:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to note that Yummy is still on its half price sale! On Tuesday the price goes back up to $1.99 (or its local equivalent).

Shiny iPhone Review

2009-08-27T21:14:00.004+01:00

It's always nice to get a good review, even more so when it's unsolicited and unexpected! Thanks to Justin at Shiny iPhone.

Yummy 1.0 Anniversary

2009-08-26T21:51:00.000+01:00

The founder of LinkedIn said "if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late." I've been involved with the launch of a number of products over the last fourteen years and I agree wholeheartedly. It was as true the first time I was involved in an internal business application back in the late nineties as it was one year ago today when I submitted Yummy to Apple for approval.

Back in August 2008 Apple were being a little quicker with their review process and it took only about a week before it went live and available for sale on the 2nd September.

I said that I was going to give away a number of copies to celebrate and, indeed, I have. This time, however, I am going to take a slightly different approach. You can now find Yummy available for half price and it will stay that way until the 2nd. Grab it while you can -- this is only the second time that I've ever reduced the price so it could be a while before I do so again!

Beta 2 Anniversary

2009-08-24T19:02:00.013+01:00

In fact this post is slightly delayed. It was a year ago yesterday that the second beta of Yummy 1.0 went out to its intended audience. However yesterday was a Sunday and most people don't read blogs, Twitter or FaceBook on a Sunday.

So as is now becoming traditional, I am giving away some copies of Yummy. This time there are three going on FaceBook, one on Twitter and the final one is: FW3XYP79LWFX. Please let me know if you manage to get a copy.

Beta 1 Anniversary

2009-08-17T19:02:00.001+01:00

A year ago today the first beta of Yummy hit the streets. Well, when I say "street" I mean a few selected iPhone users. With the vast quantity of tutorial material currently available on the internet it's difficult to remember that at this point last year everything iPhone SDK related was still covered by the NDA. This meant that getting your software running on another iPhone was tricky. The process is called "ad hoc" distribution and is still a bit of a black art.

The difference between the first beta and version 1.0 is slight, so I won't post any screen shots as I did for the first run anniversary.

As promised, I am giving away a few copies of Yummy to mark the occasion. This time there is only one promo code (redeemable only in the US App Store I'm afraid -- you have Apple to thank for that restriction) here: L3X4W9T7KLY3. Check out the FaceBook page and Twitter for the others. Please let me know if you manage to pick up one!

17+ Rating

2009-08-14T20:06:00.001+01:00

One thing that you might notice about the new version of Yummy, along with the enhancements it will also come with something that is worse than the previous version. Yes, you read that right. Of course, this isn't by my choosing. Any app with web preview is now required by Apple to have a 17+ rating.

So, this doesn't mean that the error messages now have expletives or that it automatically redirects you to porn sites occasionally. It just means that if you click the right links in the web preview you can get to questionable content. Just as you can in MobileSafari.

Yummy Browser, incidentally, keeps its 4+ rating as it doesn't have a built-in web browser and provides no way to add new, suspicious content.

Yummy 2.3 Fallout

2009-08-13T20:52:00.007+01:00

I thought that is was worth mentioning a couple of small things about the recent 2.3 release of Yummy.

The eagle-eyed will notice that it has support for the tr.im URL shortening service. Since I submitted the binary to Apple it has been shut down and subsequently resurected. On hearing the announcement I quickly scrambled together a new release that removed tr.im support and added tinyurl.com as an option. Given their change of heart I'm glad I didn't submit a new binary.

And then on Tuesday evening I found a bug: if you enable the Twitter client option but disable the "Shorten URL" feature you might find that it doesn't work as expected. Tweetie, for example, opens but you don't get a new tweet to edit.

This is because Yummy "encodes" the URL before sending it and some Twitter clients don't know how to interpret it. The work-around is to enable one of the "Shorten URL" options. (If you're using Tweetie you'll want to use bit.ly as it tries to shorten any URL it comes across... and you don't want a URL shortened with is.gd shortened again with bit.ly!)

Apologies that this slipped through my testing. I'll submit a point release that fixes this shortly.

Yummy 2.3 and Yummy Browser 2.3 Are Go!

2009-08-12T19:55:00.004+01:00

I just got the email that iPhone developers love to see: "Your application is now Ready for Sale"

So it's probably not there in iTunes as I type this but version 2.3 of Yummy should be available in the next few hours. As a recap, key features in this version are:

Add tags to a new bookmark by selecting from a list of existing tags

ReadItLater support. Now you can push your bookmarks to ReadItLater in exactly the same way that it currently works with Instapaper

Send bookmarks to Twitter using SimplyTweet

Shorten bookmarks using bit.ly, Tr.im or Cli.gs as well as is.gd

More precisely remember the screen that was visible when restarting

If you enter the URL, you can ask Yummy to go to the website and get the title. This is useful when you add a bookmark from Safari (by manually typing 'yummy:' in front of the URL) or from Twitterrific (where you can't see the title)

Changes to the way the initial download of bookmarks is handled to help avoid the dreaded Error 999

If you're keeping track, at the time of writing, these are numbers 1, 2 and 4 in the list of user feedback on UserVoice and SimplyTweet support came from a user my email.

Of course there are the usual bug fixes and refinements (you now get a "Progress" screen when posting to Instapaper rather than just locking up the UI).

At the same time, they also approved version 2.3 of Yummy Browser.

In this version you get the scrolling bookmark names that was originally introduced in Yummy 2.2. This version also includes adverts on the home screen. This is an experiment. If it works, you might see functionality working its way down from the full version of Yummy more quickly.

Yummy 2.3 Preview

2009-08-11T20:12:00.004+01:00

Here's a video showing some of the new features coming in Yummy 2.3:

With luck it will be hitting the App Store shortly.

First Run Anniversary

2009-08-07T20:56:00.010+01:00

Today marks one year since Yummy first ran on an actual iPhone rather than in the Simulator on my MacBook.

This was the icon in the original version

This was basically the first point where I thought I might actually make it available on the App Store. As such, it was almost feature complete at this stage. You could view bookmarks by date, drill down to see all the meta data, add, edit and delete bookmarks. It was pretty limited compared with the current version but still does some things that apps still available on the App Store can't do.

The date view looks kind of familiar still, but not all of it was working a year ago

The screen that's changed the most of the bookmark viewer. I originally had it with a web preview which worked nicely in the Simulator but not so well with an EDGE connection.

As promised, to mark the occasion I am giving away a few copies to lucky people with a US iTunes account (sorry, this is Apple's limitation not mine). There are five codes this time in total, three below, one on Twitter (already taken) and another on FaceBook.

L9YXFJLR4HMA
4PFWMEFLMRMX
3KWW3MFNH6Y4

If you don't manage to snag one remember that there will be three other opportunities later this month.