colin’s thoughts

This blog has moved to http://colin.fanfoot.ca

Every few days someone finds my site by searching for how to scrape app store rankings. I no longer use that script, since I found it awkward to use. I’ve switched over to using MajicRank by Majic Jungle software.

MajicRank is a Mac application that polls the top 100 lists in iTunes to find your apps. It keeps a history so you can graph and also see the change in rank since the last run. I find it very easy to launch the app every day to keep tabs on my apps’ rankings.

Yesterday, we submitted another iPhone application to Apple. This one is called Egg Painter. As you may guess, it’s an Easter Egg painting app aimed at kids. You can check out the website for it at http://www.fanfoot.ca/eggpainter.

Having become frustrated trying to check iTunes for app rankings, I decided to look for a better way to do it. That search led me to a post on Ben’s Dev Blog. The perl script given is priceless and saved me from having to write something up myself. It would be preferable to have a Mac app that does it, but this works for now.

Edit: I have switched to using a Mac app called MajicRank. See my post for more details.

Ars Technica has an article about changing text in a UISwitch robustly. It looks like a fairly interesting approach, but the issue with localization is probably a deal-breaker for me.

Here’s a great article on spatial thinking as it applies to software usability. Now I wonder about where I can use this to improve things in my own software, which is a sign of a good article.

Yesterday, Apple approved the lite version of WordMind. You can check it out on the App Store. There is only one available mode and the potential number of words to guess has been reduced to about 100.

I’m happy to announce that WordMind appeared on the App Store some time last night. You can check out the website or check it out in iTunes.

Craig Hockenberry has written a great article about how to get started developing for the iPhone. He mentions some very helpful links and resources.

As of yesterday, my first iPhone game has been submitted to Apple. The game is called WordMind and is a word guessing game. The process has been fun, though making the self imposed deadline made things a bit tougher. I learned from experience some of the things I had read about releasing software. e.g. You can’t put everything into your first release. There are so many more features I could have included, but in order to get it out the door I had to pare it down to the essentials.

When Apple has approved the app, I will post an announcement here. In the meantime, you can check out the website I made for it at http://www.fanfoot.ca/wordmind.