Roadmap (Early 2010)

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.