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.
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!
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.
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.”
The phrase “Summer Fun,” which is this weeks PhotoFriday theme, conjures up images of children splashing in brightly coloured paddling pools, beach volley ball and barbecues lasting well into the late, twilight hours. Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of any of those things. So here is a picture of a summer sunset over Brighton beach. I think walking on the beach, late in the evening while it’s still light is considered fun.
“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?”
One thing that I hear from time-to-time is that Yummy, my iPhone application, lacks “polish.” But what do people mean when they say that?
When I ask, what I usually find is that these people have never actually used it. They have probably looked at screen shots, maybe one of the screencasts. They can see that there are few graphics and little animation.
That’s fair — it’s absolutely true — but that’s not what I think of when I think of polish.
Another late entry for PhotoFriday (this is becoming a theme in and of itself). This weeks image is around the theme “Bloom” which I felt pretty much had to be about flowers. These were in Bath, UK.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Motionless.” I’m entry number 167.