App Store Adds New Countries

Previously I wrote about where to find cool scripts to handle getting the App Store Rank for each country. Back in April, Apple added a few more countries to the app store, did you know? The script attached below needs to be credited to the original author: Erica Sadun. The version I use is based off of Ben‘s script with my own modifications to it to handle multiple id’s a little cleaner, and really, just a tad of code clean up that made me feel better

The script itself is attached as a zip file here: AppStoreRank.zip. This version is still written in Perl, but it is extremely easy to add a new app to the script. At the top, just modify the following section:

@appName = ( { appName =>"Hurricane",
appID => 291430598,
categoryName => "Weather" },
{ appName => "Cat Calls",
appID => 308620543,
categoryName => "Entertainment"}
);

appName is just for display purposes
appID is your application ID from the iTunes store.
categoryName should match a category in the list below (this will pull the right category number).
As you can see in my list, the order of the parameters does not matter.

Added the following store codes to my script:
# stores added April 1, 2009
143508 => “Dominican Republic”,
143509 => ‘Ecuador’,
143516 => ‘Egypt’,
143518 => ‘Estonia’,
143510 => ‘Honduras’,
143511 => ‘Jamaica’,
143517 => ‘Kazakhstan’,
143519 => ‘Latvia’,
143520 => ‘Lithuania’,
143515 => ‘Macau’,
143521 => ‘Malta’,
143523 => ‘Moldova’,
143512 => ‘Nicaragua’,
143513 => ‘Paraguay’,
143514 => ‘Uruguay’

I am a little more retentive than most, and wanted my rankings to be listed in alphabetic order, so my version of the script does this automatically.

Also the way the script is written, it can be used as a stand alone script, or as part of a package.

If you have updated the script to add a check for Ratings, I would be very interested in seeing your changes!

Enjoy!

Tags: iPhone, perl AppStoreRank

IE6 Must Die!

A few days ago, Mashable posted an article stating that IE6 must die. The Twitter community agreed, and took it one step more and created a cause on Twibbon to spread the word!

Support IE6 Must Die and add an overlay to your avatar! Twibbon.com is the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter. Start something today !

With all of the push behind killing off Internet Explorer 6, one must really understand that it is a business decision. As web designers and developers, it is our job to express the sound judgement of what the majority of our users want to see. The unfortunate thing about this movement is that there are a lot of people in business who are stuck on IE6, because their IT departments do not see the value in updating their computers. I would think for security reasons alone the browser should be updated to at least IE7 if not IE8. Each company and business must decide their own fate.

With all of that being said, the users of our web applications should not be held back by the 15% still using IE6 in my opinion. There are SO many cool things that we can do with the new technologies, and based on the sales of next generation devices like the iPhone, people clearly want the new cool things. The answer maybe as simple as letting the user know they need to update their 8 year old browser. With services like YouTube and Facebook dropping support for IE6, where a vast majority of non-tech savvy users play on the web, the social media websites will be the biggest help in pushing users of older browsers forward. Like the upgrade from HTML 3 to HTML 4, maybe the upgrade from HTML 4 to HTML 5 will be the thing that pushes developers to drop support for the older browsers, and therefore push people who are behind to the newer browsers.

We can all hope for the best, but ultimately the people who are still using the older browsers, and the IT departments which have not rolled out the latest need to decide that now is the time. The question becomes, how do we as a development community convince those who are left behind to catch up?

Disaster Voyeurism

Disaster Voyeurism – It all starts with a hurricane

Tags: comic, hurricane