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

iPhone App Hurricane Ranking

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.

Tags: app store, hurricane, iPhone, ranking

How to track iPhone App Success

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!

Tags: app store, finance, hurricane, iPhone, ranking, reviews, tracking

Taking classes? Need flash cards?

There are various reasons and ways to use flashcards. If you are like me, you want to take them with you, hand an iPhone or other device to your child while you’re on the go so they can study up on absolutely anything. That is where Study Stack and gFlashPro come in. Study Stack is the back end providing the flash card data, and gFlashPro is the iPhone app which allows you to take your flash card deck anywhere you go. The combination helped my daughter pass a music vocabulary test she was worried about, as well as improve grades in other subjects. She simply created her flash card deck on Study Stack, then grabbed the stack using gFlashPro, and now she can take it with her anywhere we go. In the car, in a restaurant, or in her room – Study Stack lets her study when and where she wants without taking a bulky stack of cards anywhere.

Tags: flash cards, iPhone, study

Are you afraid of shadows?

Have you ever wondered how iTunes manages all those cool effects with the iPhone App images? The neat text shadows and box shadows for images, the curved corners… I thought it was something they were using an image tool for, but the more I looked at the feeds, the more I noticed that the the feeds were just that, straight text with not a lot of graphics. Yes, the app image is an image, and yes they are manipulating it, but does it surprise you to know that they are simply using CSS3 effects that are available in WebKit?

I was going through styles at the end of my work day today because our pages just look so bland. I was looking for easy ways to spice it up, even just a little. I started playing with shadows, and instantly fell in love. I made the title of the page look like it was popping out of the screen, and the boxes appear above the page. These were VERY cool effects, but they would only be available to webkit browsers – Safari on Windows and OSX, and on the iPhone and iPod Touch – pretty much anywhere if I understand the documentation correctly.

And that’s when it hit me. Isn’t Google’s Chrome web browser based on WebKit too? So I open it up to the page I was testing and wow! My shadows all worked wonderfully!

I was upset because I know FireFox 3 does not support shadows, but then found a reference to FireFox 3.1a saying that this will be the first version that allows for the shadows. About time I say!

But here we are, supporting an 8 year old browser which will never support these cool effects. I even looked to see if IE8 will show the text shadowing, and even though it’s in RC1, it does not support text shadowing. Maybe that’s why there’s word on the street that IE8 will possibly be the last version – which I’m sure only means for the engine, which is already out dated before launch since it does not support many of the visual effects that WebKit does, which really amounts to the coolest browsing with the least overhead.

With any luck, the tide will turn, and we will be able to produce more and more rich web applications, with eye-popping effects by simply using CSS. Here’s to hoping!

Tags: css, css3, firefox, google chrome, ie6, ie7, ie8, iPhone, safari

iPhone Web App Performance Tips

I just found this about inlining images, they say ideally put the images in the external css since it’s cached…

iPhone Web App Performance Tip: Use Inline Images

Another tidbit of information that I want to be able to find again:
iPhone URL Scheme Referece

Of course, there is always the good stuff: Safari Events

Tags: inline images, iPhone, mobi, performance, web app

iPhone – I can’t hear you!

I absolutely adore my iPhone. It goes with me everywhere, and it does everything I need and more. How did I ever live without it? Right now, I’m asking how can I live with it? I have the ringer set to full-blast, and even have vibrate turned on. But for some reason, half the time I don’t hear the thing, or feel it in my pocket! Every other phone I’ve had has had a significant vibrate feature, which allows the vibration to be felt even in a purse. My iPhone, not so much. I have missed many a call (one right after the other no less) because of this. I’ve even been yelled at for not answering my phone, when I had it right there!

Sigh — the next iPhone needs to have a more significant vibrate feature so that when someone calls, I feel it.

Tags: iPhone, ring, vibrate