It occurs to me I haven’t really talked about my little indie app over here on my personal blog. We released a new version today so I thought I might talk about how it came to be and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.
I like to keep the Bookmarks bar hidden in Chrome. I tend to not really use bookmarks much, although every so often I need to use a bookmarklet to send something to Instapaper, Delicious, Pinterest, etc. By the way Pinterest is actually pretty handy for collecting little user interface snippets that I like. Anyway, I didn’t want to click on the Bookmarks menu, but I also don’t want a row of 24, or so, useless pixels always sitting at the top of my browser.
What to do?
I don’t know why I didn’t try this sooner. PowerMate can open a URL, but that doesn’t really work with a javascript URL sadly. But! Both Chrome and Safari allow the execution of javascript via AppleScript. I have no idea about Firefox or any others, I didn’t bother to check. Anyway, it would be great if I could just bop the PowerMate whenever I have something I win to pin / save / tweet / share, etc. So I created a PowerMate trigger with a custom AppleScript that looks like this (this one demonstrates posting to Pinterest):
tell application "Google Chrome"
execute active tab of window 1 javascript "void((function(){var
e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('type','text/
javascript');e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/
pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());"
end tell
So perhaps that looks like gobbledygook to you. It pretty much does to me too. So I created a PowerMate set file that demonstrates using bookmarklets with PowerMate in a couple of different ways for both Chrome and Safari. A normal click with no modifiers will pin to Pinterest. A normal click with the control key held posts to Twitter. And a long press will open a menu letting you pick from Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, and Delicious. There should be enough there to demonstrate how to configure these bookmarklets however you like.
Oh there is one little wrinkle. The Instapaper is customized for each account so you’ll need to do a bit of editing there. Just replace the ID in the script with the ID found in your Instapaper bookmarklet.
The PowerMate set file can be downloaded here. Just unzip, drop it in the PowerMate app, and configure as needed.
Lately I’ve been wondering about the composition of the top apps on the App Store. You may remember that a while back I took a look at the composition of the Top 200 paid / grossing apps versus the number of submissions in each category. I kind of wanted to look at it in a slightly different way this time.
I was wondering if there was any difference between the composition of the top categories on the iPhone versus the iPad. I also wanted to see how the composition of the top free charts compared to the top grossing charts. And finally I wanted to take a look at the Games sub-category breakdown. I’m not going to go into too much detail, rather just point out a few things that popped out at me as I looked over the numbers.
So I stumbled across Empire Avenue this evening. Another web site sort of like klout or peerindex but this one has a bit of a twist. Basically your personal social identity or brand is tradable in this sort of virtual stock market… thingy. Other users can buy / sell shares in your social identity based on whether they think you’re likely to increase or decrease in value. Your value is partly determined by how active you are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. So the whole site revolves around this virtual currency knows as eaves. You can earn eaves through trading virtual shares of other users/brands, completing various achievements (there are many) and, of course, you can pony up some real cash to purchase more eaves if you’re running low.
So there’s that.
Another way you can earn eaves is through missions. Users or brands that are looking to promote a web page or app, gain some likes on a facebook page, etc, can create missions rewarding you for these actions. I’m unable to create a mission at the moment, though I imagine that’s because I just signed up this evening. Or maybe it’s broken. It does seem a little half baked in several places. You can also create an advertising using eaves as currency to fund impressions. These cost a certain amount of eaves per page view.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it so far, but may be worth a look as a possible promotional tool or maybe it can somehow be used to gauge your social influence, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in it!
Ha!
A few weeks back I mentioned that I’d been thinking about an overhaul for the old web site here. Well, I finally made good on that threat (except the roots section, it still looks all old timey). I didn’t start out with a particular layout in mind. Just sort of started playing with the Mario background and it snowballed from there. Turned out okay I think. I also like that, apart from the social icons (brought to you by komodomedia), there are only 2 images used. The rest is all CSS.
I haven’t checked to see what it looks like with every single post, so I’m sure there are bound to be some pages that don’t render too well. I guess I’ll fix those problems as they come up. I’ve also not added any of the social thingies in: facebook, twitter, google+, etc. I may or may not add those things back in.
And maybe now that I like looking at it again, I’ll start writing a bit more. We’ll see.