Screenshot:
Tag lj for webos (12)
taking joy in fixing a badly broken LJ app
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2011-12-29 17:10:00
Tags: lj for webos essay palmpre projects programming
Words: 211
After the latest LJ release, I got a few emails saying LJ for WebOS was badly broken, and lo and behold they were right.
I was not excited about fixing the app, since I knew the code for parsing posts, which is most of what broke, was pretty brittle and terrible. (c.f. "don't parse HTML pages with hand-written state machines") And I don't even use the app much anymore, and it's certainly not going to sell many more copies since it only works on webOS phones, which are not exactly flying off the shelves, and new ones might not exist. So I toyed with the idea of dropping support entirely, but that just felt wrong, even though I'd rather be working on new shiny apps for Windows Phone 7.
Last night I took the first serious stab at fixing things, and it turned out to be much more fun than I had hoped. The app was so nonfunctional it felt like writing a whole new one, and it turns out the new page format is a bit nicer to parse to boot. So I've fixed maybe 60% of the issues already, and hopefully I can fix the rest by next week sometime (pending New Year's festivities) and get back to WP7.
LJ for WebOS: the saga ends!
Mood: surprised
Posted on 2011-03-15 13:06:00
Tags: lj for webos palmpre projects
Words: 64
After my last LJ for WebOS adventure, I was a bit down. But, I look at the App Catalog today, and the most recent review has been upgraded from 1 star to 3 with the text: "A recent update has greatly improved the readability of the themes, so is[sic] that's what put you off before I suggest taking another look."
Yay! Thanks, random person!
Salvaging the looks of LJ for WebOS
Mood: sad
Posted on 2011-03-13 15:01:00
Tags: lj for webos palmpre projects
Words: 147
An excerpt from the most recent review of LJ for WebOS: "...most recent update has made it so ugly that it is unusable." This makes me sad!
So - here's my plan:
- the most recent update added themes, some of which are not terrible (I think). So I added a dialog box on first launch that points this out and makes it easy to try them.
- I also created a "plain" theme (see the first screenshot on the LJ for WebOS page, so if you really hate every one of the other themes, at least you can fall back to that one. I also made it the default theme, which made me a little sad but people can always change it if they want.
Here's hoping this will make people happy! Of course, people rarely go back and change their reviews so I'm probably stuck with that one...
LJ for WebOS update
Mood: hopeful
Posted on 2010-04-16 10:11:00
Tags: lj for webos palmpre projects
Words: 297
The good news: Since my last update, I'm up to 132 copies sold. I've added some new features, including the heavily-requested thumbnails in posts, and I made a video walkthrough of the app that's linked to from the App Catalog. (which is a cool feature - thanks Palm!)
The bad news: The rate of sales is really slowing down - this last week I had three days in a row where no copies were sold, which is the first time that's happened since I've been tracking the daily numbers. Pushing the update helped a little, but I'm getting a feeling that the market may be somewhat saturated - the intersection of "people who own a Pre" and "people who use LiveJournal enough that they're willing to pay a few bucks for a good client" probably isn't that big to begin with. Or maybe it's just a blip; I suppose time will tell.
I was hoping that I might squeak in to the Palm Hot Apps competition, but looking at the leaderboard I'm a ways out from the #200 slot. Right now I'd have to sell 51 more copies to get on the list, and that's only going to go up over time. Oh well!
In any case, I've had a lot of fun working on LJ for WebOS and I'm glad that people seem to generally find it useful. I'm hoping to publish my next app (the FlightCaster-based one) within a few weeks - it's mostly ready to go but I'm waiting on some API changes before I call it done, and then I have to make a video, etc.
A post by someone on Palm's developer relations team sums up well why I like WebOS so much and why I'm going to be a sad panda if it goes away.
health care (basically) passed! and a local shoutout
Mood: ecstatic
Posted on 2010-03-22 14:28:00
Tags: lj for webos essay projects politics links
Words: 409
The health care bill passed the House! The plan is for the Senate to pass it this week and then Obama will sign it into law.
The bill: Here's some information on the final bill - it was confusing for a while with the House bill and the Senate bill, but this is the final one. It expands coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans. It prohibits lifetime limits on insurance coverage and denial of coverage due to preexisting conditions. Yes, it's not a perfect bill, and it's hard to predict how well the cost control measures will work, and there's no public option, but there's a lot of good stuff in the bill. And it will be easier to adjust this bill in the future than if we had started over or given up because it wasn't "good enough". As James Fallows said:
There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these. Despite everything that is wrong with this bill and the thousand adjustments that will be necessary in the years to come, this is a very important step.
One more LJ for WebOS sighting
Mood: happy
Posted on 2010-03-17 11:32:00
Tags: lj for webos palmpre projects
Words: 33
After it made the Palm homepage, Precentral reported on the new homepage and mentioned LJ for WebOS by name. Cool beans!
(and, yes, this will be the last of these for a while)
LJ for WebOS featured on palm homepage!
Mood: excited
Posted on 2010-03-16 17:22:00
Tags: lj for webos palmpre projects
Words: 20
LJ for WebOS is currently being featured on the Palm homepage! (it's the lower right of the 3x3 grid)
Screenshot:
Palm and LJ for WebOS
Mood: thoughtful
Posted on 2010-03-04 13:14:00
Tags: lj for webos essay palmpre projects programming
Words: 747
I worry about Palm sometimes. They recently lowered their guidance for this quarter, analysts don't seem too upbeat, and their stock price for the last year looked promising when they released the Pre in July, but has dropped dramatically since then.
More concerning is the fact that, 9 months after releasing the first WebOS phone, Gartner estimates that 0.7% of smartphones are running WebOS. Hopefully this will improve now that they're on Verizon (and rumor is they'll be on AT&T sometime this year) and once they launch in more countries.
The good news is that the mobile phone market isn't quite like, say, the social networking website market, which has a very strong network effect. If all your friends are leaving Friendster for Facebook, then Friendster is less valuable to you, and you'll probably switch to Facebook. But I can still use the web just fine from my Palm Pre even if the rest of the world switches to iPhones and Droids and Nexus Ones. There is somewhat of a problem that if fewer people use WebOS, fewer people will write apps for it, but this is more of a slow process. Also, at least in the US, most people are under contract for their phones and so they only have an opportunity to switch cheaply every one or two years. I'm really hoping Palm can keep turning things around - just yesterday they released an update to the Facebook app that makes it much nicer.
Speaking of apps...
LJ for WebOS has been doing pretty well since my last update - as of this very moment I've sold 72 copies. It seems fairly random how many copies are sold a day - thanks to the new app My WebOS Apps I have a nifty graph on my phone with these totals for the last week: 5, 1, 1, 2, 4, 2, 0. So...who knows?
One of the frustrating parts has been seeing bad reviews indicating that it just isn't working for a few people. Most of these reviews came early and I'm pretty sure I've fixed the bugs since then, but most people don't go back and edit their review when problems get fixed, and I have no way of contacting them to ask them if it's working for them and to try to diagnose their problem if not. I've been trying to make it more and more obvious how to contact me to the point that if you can't load the posts a dialog comes up with a button to email me the problem. We'll see if this helps at all. Encouragingly, more of the recent reviews have been good than bad, bringing the average back up to 3.5/5 stars.
I spent a lot of last week working on a new feature that I really wanted to add: the ability to browse other people's journals. I even wrote the parsing code before I got stuck on a problem that I've gotten stuck on before - the inability to properly authenticate so that the client can load friends-only posts. The API way to do this is to call the sessiongenerate method - unfortunately LiveJournal's cookie scheme has changed because of some security holes, and no one's gone back and updated or added a new API.
Every time I run into this problem, I spent some time trying to "fake it" by POSTing the right thing to the login page, essentially pretending I'm a regular user signing in from a browser. As in the past, I can't get this to work and I'm not sure why, and it's really frustrating to try to debug because it's all guesswork.
So I was a little down about that, and the last release (made it to the App Catalog yesterday) only had a few small features like deleting posts. This week I took a stab at some random not-quite-featurey things that have been on my list for a while, and everything just kinda worked. The next release will use a lot less bandwidth on the initial request (66% less in my test case!), and it fixes a bug with comments not posting by showing the CAPTCHA dialog that LiveJournal was returning. I was amazed that both of these basically worked the first time, so that was a nice pick me up :-) I'll probably submit it to the App Catalog tonight after a bit more testing.
I'm running out of features to work on that are actually possible to do, so I'm very open to suggestions!
LJ for WebOS: 2.5 weeks later
Mood: okay
Posted on 2010-02-17 10:55:00
Tags: lj for webos essay projects
Words: 577
It's been 2.5 weeks since LJ for WebOS was published on the Palm App Catalog, so I thought it would be nice to talk about how many copies have sold and whatnot.
As of this very moment (according to Palm's magic page that I reload far more often than I should), I've sold 44 copies. You can see a rough graph of the copies per day here, although this tracks downloads and not purchases, so for example when an update got published yesterday the download numbers spiked but the purchases did not.
I was actually expecting a little more of a bump from my app being near the top of the "Recent" list in the App Catalog, but I only sold 2 copies yesterday, which is around the same as most days. Which in retrospect makes sense, because already my app's appeal is fairly limited: only WebOS users who also use LiveJournal and use both enough that they'd be willing to pay to get a better interface to it. An impulse buy this is not.
This is part of the reason I priced it as $2.99, which is "high" in App Catalog terms - the number of people who would be interested in it is so artificially limited in the first place. Of course the other reason is that I think it provides at least that much value - it's much more pleasant to use than LiveJournal's mobile site, which is really the only alternative.
So how much money have I made? Well, let's do the math: 44 copies at $3 each is $132. My cut of that is 70%, which is $92.40. I had to pay $50 to get it on the App Catalog in the first place, so that's down to $42.40, and after taxes I end up with around $32.
On the one hand, hey, free money, right? Except I've spent a ton of time on this project. I've been working on it in my spare time since August, and I've written over 7000 lines of JavaScript code. I've definitely put at least 50 hours into it and probably closer to 100, so calculating the hourly rate is a little depressing. This is probably the project I've spent the second-most amount of time on. (I'm guessing top is whereslunch.org)
I think I put myself in a bad place here - when I work on projects for fun and release them "to the world" open source and all (see: almost everything on gregstoll.com) then I get the satisfaction of completing a project and the satisfaction whenever I see anyone use it, which is a pretty low bar. When I work on stuff for money, then, well, I get money for it, and the idea that someone cares enough about what I'm working on to pay for it.
But this model where I work on stuff in my spare time for fun and then try to make a little money off of it puts me in the mindset of working for the money, and then when the money fails to materialize I get depressed about it. Not to mention I've spent so much time on this in the last few weeks that I could feel myself burning out last night. So I think I'm going to back off a bit on new features and work on things that seem interesting or useful to me, not necessarily other people.
Anyway, this has been a bit meandering, so thanks for reading :-)
Interested in LJ for WebOS?
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2010-02-07 23:10:00
Tags: lj for webos projects
Words: 14
If you've interested in LJ for WebOS, why not sign up for our newsletter?
LJ for WebOS mentioned!
Mood: happy
Posted on 2010-02-04 23:31:00
Tags: lj for webos projects programming
Words: 26
Yay! LJ for WebOS was mentioned in the latest news post. If anyone's interested, here's the homepage, and I'm happy to answer any questions about it.
LJ for WebOS released!
Mood: accomplished
Posted on 2010-02-01 10:50:00
Tags: lj for webos projects programming
Words: 57
I'm happy to announce that my LiveJournal client for WebOS devices has just been released on the Palm App Catalog! It includes support for:
- viewing your friends post and own posts
- making posts with custom security, userpics, and tags
- uploading photos to imgur.com and including them in posts
- viewing cached posts offline
Here's the official home page.
This backup was done by LJBackup.