It’s nearly four years old now, so I do expect the odd beach ball occasionally. When my MacBook is doing something hard or complex or just opening iTunes, it often shows its “I’m too busy to respond to you right now” indicator. But this time it was different. The beachball appeared and didn’t really go away again. Sure, it occasionally hid but as soon as I instructed the machine to do anything it would return.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

We’ve already talked about most of the work, starting with an overview, the announcement, the low level technical challenges and the implementation (technical and UI). All that remains it to launch it, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

On Monday I gave an overview of the problem, Tuesday I looked at how those changes were announced and why they were tricky, and yesterday I looked at how I actually implemented those technical details.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

On Monday I gave an overview of the problem and yesterday I looked at how those changes were announced and why they were tricky. Today we’ll look at how I actually implemented those technical details — though not at the code level so don’t worry if you’re not a programmer!

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the second in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

Yesterday I spoke at a high level about my iPhone application and some changes that Yahoo! made to their side of the system. Today I’d like to talk in a little more detail about how those changes were announced and why they were tricky.

## Background

For the benefit of any new visitors, I develop an iPhone application called Yummy that connects to the Delicious.com “social bookmarking” website, allowing you to access and share your bookmarks using a far more usable interface than the native web or mobile optimised version of the site.

In the olden days — that is more than six months ago — to access Delicious all you had to do was enter a user name and password. As a developer it was very similar. Whenever you wanted to access something that required authorisation — adding a new bookmark for example — you had to supply the same credentials as you would on the web: a username and password. This, in web terminology, is called “basic authentication.”

“Do you ever change this type of trade?”

I was sat on the trading floor discussing a new feature that I was implementing with the person who would be using it the most.

“No, never.”

This was one detail of the change that would have far-reaching consequences in the code. A “no” would mean a few days of development, a “yes” would indicate several weeks.

“Are you absolutely sure? You don’t change it even once a month?”

• No sense of humour at all – “Personally, I’d love to see the Pope in a debate on abortion, where he would actually have to address difficult questions and defend his own ideas. Best idea yet would be a debate on various controversial topics, like birth control, abortion, the role of women in the church, and homosexuality…with the Pope on one side, and Stephen Fry on the other. It could be perfectly respectful, and it would be hilarious.”
• Audio slideshow: Hubble’s first 20 years – Amazing. Beautiful.
• Do liberals read only liberal blogs? – The dangers of the “long tail…” I deliberately go read Daily Mail headlines on a regular basis just to check that I’m sane. The moment I start to agree, please shoot me.

I don’t mean to single out a single business here. The flaw I’m pointing out is shared by many sites but this post was inspired by a recent visit to TripIt. In general it’s a great service. It’s well thought out, allowing you to enter all your details with a minimum of effort; just forwarding your email confirmation to them is a masterstroke.

However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.

• Palm Pre smartphone – “So you’re after a smartphone, you’ve got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It’s a bit smaller than the iPhone and ‘Synergy’ works well, which could prove useful if you’re more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it’s hard to recommend.”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?