Applist.me shares your iPhone apps. Usefull? | Hacker News Reader

Applist.me shares your iPhone apps. Usefull?

applist.me

12 pointsdmorre17 comments

The current tendency of websites to use font-shadows to give text an engraved look is extremely irritating; it reduces readability (which is already very low given that you're using grey text on a light blue background), and makes the text look somewhat blurry. I will admit that it can look good, but only when used sparsely; using it for all the text in a page is a bit much.

Also, you might want to do some grammar-checking on the English version of the site. "We where frustrated" should be "We were frustrated," "That's why we build applist.me" should be either "That's why we built applist.me" or "That's why we're building applist.me," in "which short-link ist yours" "ist" should be "is." There are some other issues with commas, and a few places where the phrasing is awkward or contradictory ("There are no restrictions at the moment. As long as you can remember your link" could be reduced to just one sentence, and in fact either of the component sentences would work perfectly well as an answer to the question).

I like this site. I think the idea is good. One of the main ways I get good recommendations is by asking friends about their top 3 apps. I've submitted my applist. Here are the suggestions I would make:

  * Use geolocation to guess at whether to show German or English.
  * Bring out the App Store selection from the preferences to the main window
      in the OS X program. Link this in to the in-website selection of German
      and English language (it's a good guess about which App Store they use).
      This way you don't need to do the next bullet point.
  * Don't rely on people seeing your .txt and .jpg in your zip file; I didn't.
      Distribute your program as a .dmg disk image so that you can have an
      image on the background of your window to tell people to change the
      preferences.
  * Might be good to have a Deutsch/English link on the applist web page.
  * Consider using the App icons in the selection list on OS X. The name
     shown on the iPhone is not always the same name as the official App
     name so identification can be difficult in the list.

Expanded scope:

  * Consider a small set of categories - just 3 perhaps - along the lines 
     of 'useful' 'essential' and 'fun'.
  * Although the core idea is good and I enjoy it, the website for me is 
     not very useful. I could stop writing at this point but thought I'd 
     say that in an ideal world I'd like to you to 'allow me to see applists
     of people who would be my friend if only I knew them'.

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the site.

As native-english speaker who lived in Germany for a while I would strongly suggest NOT to use geolocation to pick the default language. Use the browser Accept-Language setting to pick the default - this is what it's for and most browsers send it. I can see from the headers on your site that you are using PHP, so here's a link to some PHP code that will parse the browser headers (and correctly interpret their weighting also):

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/use-accept-language-he...

You can use this as a starting point to redirect to the appropriate language when none has been explicitly chosen. It's a small touch, but small touches all add up to a nicer experience.

Please DON'T use geolocation to guess the language. Use accept-language.

Except for people living in Germany who prefer English there are plenty of people living close to Germany who may receive the german version of the site as well.

I like it and think it might be useful! Perhaps integrate it with Facebook (as an app) so that you can amplify it's social aspect. The design is great too.

One minor gripe is that i was served the German language version by default. Unless you are targeting 99% Germans, perhaps it should be the other way around.

One of the things that irritates me to no end is browsing the app store on my device and wondering if I've bought an app I'm looking at (and deleted it or not installed it on that device). Knowing if I really am buying an app or not would be nice.

A list like this might be helpful, but I suppose I could also just store `ls ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications` in Simplenote to get about the same functionality.

I think Apple is working on this problem. The newest version of Mac/iPad app store already has an indicator when you bought an app IIRC.

I've been thinking about a few ideas relating to app recommendations, and I wish there were a way to do this on the device instead of running something on your computer. Having to run something on your computer is really going to limit adoption of a system like this.

That said, I think this is a good way to work with what's available.

Thanks. And, yes of course. But sadly there is no API available and the only other direct alternative is to "print out" a list in iTunes.

Also appshopper.com, but the have to mutch overhead for simply sharing your apps, imho.

there was an article about bump's new app recommendation feature on techcrunch the other day. ios 4 lets you pull a list of recently opened apps...

There is not a way to do this on the device (on iOS, while not jailbroken)

Actually, I think it was mentioned that they have a method where they look at your other apps that are currently open. They make a decision based on how often you have those applications open when it is polling. It seems like a pretty good method if possible.

All you see then is process names. You can't see real CPU time, etc.

You can do heuristics, etc, but you have a huge mapping problem of programs to actual apps

Something similar for Macs in general (not just iPhone/iPad) might be useful. You can even try recommending apps to users and allow people to share their app list with each other (and not just people they know personally).

Not sure who it'd help. Are you that afraid of talking to your friends directly?

It's more ment to save you the time, typing a list of 100+ app-names. I'm not afraid of talking to friends. But when I met them, i'd rather won't use the valuable time to talk them through a huge list of iPhone applications.

s/Usefull/Useful

FTFY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com