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Disaster Voyeurism
Posted by admin on Jul 18, 2009 in weather
Disaster Voyeurism – It all starts with a hurricane 
iPhone App Hurricane Ranking
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in iPhone
In my previous post, I mentioned an app that shows you your current ranking in the iTunes App Store. This list is modified for order, but uses the script:
Hurricane Ranking in Category Weather:
Mexico: 1
United States: 8
Canada: 11
El Salvador: 12
Slovenia: 17
Indonesia: 22
Deutschland: 24
Thailand: 26
Singapore: 29
Luxembourg: 29
Argentina: 31
Sweden: 33
United Kingdom: 35
Greece: 32
Italia: 45
Belgium: 46
Nederland: 46
Espana: 51
Turkey: 53
Norway: 55
Japan: 57
France: 61
Schweitz/Suisse: 61
Australia: 70
Using this perl script, I could also take a look to see how my competition is doing in the same markets. For data and information, the possibilities are endless.
How to track iPhone App Success
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in iPhone
A few months ago, I posted that our Hurricane App hit #1 in Mexico. I checked back again yesterday, and it still seems to be at #1, or it hit #1 again. While I haven’t automated the check, I did notice that there were a lot of people looking for how to find their App Ranking in various countries in the iTunes store. For us, tracking the ranking of Hurricane has been fairly easy. We have remained in the top 25 paid weather apps in the US since the release on September 16, 2008, and have been within the top 10 since February, and hit top 5 when a storm looked like it was brewing this week. Over all, considering the amount of apps that are now in the weather category, and that Hurricane is a very niche app, it is doing exceedingly well.
When looking for your app ranking in other countries, the missing key is simply to go to the iTunes Store main page, scroll all the way down to the bottom, then use the select box to switch your country, or click on the flag dot to see a list of flags and countries.
Once you are in the new country, click on App Store, and your category, then start searching for your app. You cannot use the “search” feature because you will loose your place. Quite annoying I assure you.
To find your reviews, there are automated systems out there which you can purchase and/or use.
AppViz by Ideaswarm – $29.95 – Mac OSX
This Mac OSX application not only downloads and visualizes decent daily/weekly/monthly monetary reports, it also pulls the reviews for each country. It will also export the original reports. This app has saved me hours of spreadsheet time! I fire this app up a few times a week to check on how things are going with my sales.
AppSales – a Google Code project – Free – iPhone
I have this app loaded on my iPhone. When I got it, it was the only iPhone App tracker app available for the iPhone. This is the app I look at every day to see where my sales for the previous day were. This app shows you your daily and weekly sales, accumulates them for the month, as well as the break downs per app and per country. It is a very simple interface, giving the basic necessities. They have an updated version which also has graphing – which I will need to pick up very soon! Someone asked why they are not selling this app in the App Store, and the simple reason was because they want you the user to know that your data is secure. This app must be compiled by a developer and put onto an iPhone. Considering my financial information is in that app, along with identification information, I am VERY okay with that reasoning.
Sales Tracker by CXI Gaming – $18.99 – iPhone
This app can be found in the iTunes App Store. I haven’t checked it out, since I’ve already paid for AppViz. However, it seems to have all the same data as AppSales, with a much more refined interface. For security, they say they use the Apple Keychain, and have the ability to turn off automatic login. The drawback that I can see with this app is that it requires OS 2.2.1, which means that anyone who has not yet upgraded their iPhones (not sure why this would be an issue for a developer??) will find this app a waste of their money.
Scraping AppStore Reviews article by Erica Sadun – Perl Script
If you are looking to pull iPhone Reviews and understand Perl, this article was written with all the details, and the script. This script could also get you started on pulling app store ranking as well. But you really need to dive in and understand the system before you can do this.
Scraping App Store Rankings Around the World article by Ben Chatelain – Perl Script
This however is the script to beat all scripts. Again, it’s written in Perl, but it will report back what your current app store ranking is in each country. This one I just found while writing this article, but now, I think I will go give it a whirl. It would be neat to see if I can get AppViz to incorporate this into their application
In short, a quick Google search on what you are looking for really provides some great results. Some of these things I happen to know about because of word of mouth, so maybe this will help those apps get a little more visibility.
If you know of other apps that I have not listed here, please feel free to comment!
Hurricanes, Amateur Radio and life
Posted by admin on Apr 25, 2009 in iPhone
What I should be doing with my free time right now is getting the new hurricane site finished up, but I am having a hard time getting into it. Lately I have been working on certifications, learning the new changes from the NHC and spending much needed time with my family. The other thing is socializing on Twitter (@weatherangel) about all of my interests, and more. It is amazing how much time that service can suck up when you are not paying attention! And then work gets 10 hours of my day, every day.
What about today? Waiting for my son to finish math tutoring while posting here, updating plugins, watching Twitter and listening to the radio. Mult-itasking at it’s best!
