## 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.”

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.

• June 22, 1783: Icelandic Volcano Disrupts Europe’s Economy – It’s not just 2010 where this was a problem…
• WWDC – The Acceleration – “But at one point everything exploded and there was no way to keep up with all the new API:s and all the new things Java was attempting to do. I feel that we’re approaching that point with iOS (formerly known as the iPhone OS).” As someone who does this in my spare time, this is certainly something that I’m feeling right now!
• I’m Comic Sans, Asshole – Your favourite font responds to criticism…

• iPad App Pricing – Nice analysis of iPad and iPhone application pricing.
• The Value of Ideas – “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.” Or actions speak louder than words.
• The IBM Muppet Show – “IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff.”

• Mobile Multitasking – “The new way is to rethink the fundamental deal for processes. In the old model, processes that have already been launched get priority — once running, they stay running. In the new model, the user’s intentions get priority. You press the home button, you’re going to see the home screen in a moment, whether the app that was running was ready to be closed or not. If you want to open another app, it’s going to open immediately, even if the system has to pull the plug on an app in the background to free enough RAM.”
• Please Make the iPhone Weather Application Location Aware – As per subject line…
• iPhone OS 4 and Multitasking – What multitasking on the iPhone really means. It’s all kind of moot for me anyway since I can’t run OS4 on my first generation iPhone!

• Rejoice this day! – My sentiments exactly!
• Lost labels for your DHARMA Initiative needs – This is great. I think I’m going to have to re-label everything in the cupboard at home!
• It must have been a slow news day at ZDNet – These arguments against iPhone development come up all the time on places like StackOverflow. This is a great explanation of why they mostly make no sense.

• March 30, 1848: Niagara Falls Runs Dry – Bizarre.
• Twitter fixes oAuth for desktop and mobile with xAuth – Just as I add Twitter support to Yummy, they change something. Typical.
• Famous Movie Quotes – Movie quotes visualised. (via @kottke)

• On Apple suing HTC – Like many people, I just don’t see Apple’s actions here being very constructive. Seems like a waste of money and good will.
• Curiosity – “Curiosity is one of the most underrated phenomena in the world. It’s ironic that people aren’t more curious about curiosity. It’s a powerful thing.”

• Tits and Apps – About most of the ‘sexy’ iPhone apps being pulled last weekend: “What developers see is that the App Store is a shaky foundation upon which to build a business. One day you’re prospering, the next day your app is gone. There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren’t being built because developers don’t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them.”
• Infer.NET – Seen at the BCS/IET Turing Lecture by Chris Bishop. Looks interesting.
• Sources offer peek at Adobe Creative Suite 5 for Mac – PhotoShop CS5: what do you do to the app that has everything? Not a lot, visually at least…

I see every now and again that Apple needs to make it easier to allow developers to save the state of their application so that they open up exactly as they were when they were shut down.

Obviously I’m all for Apple making my life easy, but that’s not going to happen for a while yet so I thought I’d share how I implemented it in Yummy.

The key is this simple protocol: