parthchopra

Hey HN!

After getting tired of the clunky web interfaces for managing app reviews on both Apple App Store Connect and Google Play Console, I built rustpond – a fast terminal UI that lets you respond to reviews from both platforms in one place.

What it does:

- Unified interface for iOS (App Store Connect) and Android (Google Play) reviews

- AI-powered responses using OpenAI optimized with keywords for your app for ASO (optional)

- Vim-like navigation with arrow keys, word jumping (Option+arrows), and text editing

- Real-time character limits (350 chars for Android, unlimited for iOS)

- Pagination support for Android's API limitations

- JWT authentication for iOS, OAuth2 service accounts for Android

Why build this?

The official web dashboards are painfully slow (App Store Connect dashboard goes down regularly for maintenance), especially when you're managing reviews for multiple apps. Context switching between platforms is annoying, and the text editors are basic. Inspired by Claude Code's simple TUI, I wanted to build something that provided the same ease of use.

Fun technical bits:

- Written in Rust using tui-rs and crossterm for the interface (this is actually my first project in Rust, I wanted an excuse to learn the language)

- Cross-platform key handling (turns out Option+Backspace sends different escape sequences on different terminals! I mapped it to let me navigate between words easily and delete entire words when writing responses to reviews)

- Async pagination for Google Play's API, which only returns last 7 days worth of reviews (this is annoying to get around)

- Smart token management with automatic refresh for both platforms

Other Features:

- Static cursor

- Live character counter for Android responses

- Loads all available review pages automatically

- Shows device info, app versions, and response history

Repo: https://github.com/parthematics/rustpond (would love any contributions!)

Would love feedback from other app developers who deal with this pain point! The authentication setup is a bit involved (you need keys from both Apple and Google), but once configured, it's a LOT faster than the web interfaces.

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P.S. - the name is a play on being able to "respond" to reviews. Respond, rustpond, haha.

Found this interesting random walk simulation. I thought random walks tended to stay close to the initial state, regardless of the number of steps/step size, but this simulation ends up making some pretty cool random walk art.

Hey HN! Been working on a new blogging service recently to encourage me to journal more and recount my thoughts in 2024. With Apple's new journaling app, I realized there was too much functionality and that I'd be more inclined to using something with a much simpler and hackier aesthetic. Decided to take an old-school approach and build something that resembled old Wordpress blogs (simple, barebones, no fluff) and made it easy for me to submit new entries - not too different from how HN works today!

So far, I've been writing entries for 7 days straight (a new journaling record for me). Entries are all private by default, but allow for users to create shareable links to share with friends/family if desired. Code is open source if anyone would like to contribute and make pezblog better! (repo: https://github.com/parthematics/pezblog)

Would really appreciate any feedback and tips on how to make this app better + more usable. Hoping someone other than me and my family can find some use out of this!

Wanted to share a project that some friends and I wrapped up this weekend. Thought it would be fun for the Taylor Swift fans. Open to any and all feedback!

And yes, we can definitely extend this to other artists as well. Just wanted to start somewhere :)