Presenting, Appirater

Arash — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Like most developers, I’m not thrilled with the way the App Store presents my apps. There are several problems, but in particular, I really don’t like the user review system. It’s biased towards bad reviews, and that ends up hurting sales (there are odd exceptions to this). The only time a user is reminded or asked to rate an app is when you delete it, and you probably don’t care for the app if you’re deleting it. In comparison to the unhappy user, the satisfied user rarely takes the time to review your app. Which leaves you with crummy reviews from uninformed users hurting sales of your app.

If Apple would allow developers to respond to reviews, or more easily challenge the validity of a review, this would be no big deal. But I don’t have any hopes of Apple wising up and fixing anything, so I’m left trying to get more positive reviews of my apps to drown out the negatives ones.

Appirater
The goal of Appirater is to encourage your satisfied user’s to rate your app. To use it, place the Appirater code into your project, and add the following code in your app’s delegate class.

// import the Appirater class

#import "Appirater.h"

@implementation MyAppDelegate
- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions {

    // all your app’s startup code

    // …

    // call the Appirater class

    [Appirater appLaunched];

    return YES;

}
@end

Finally, open up Appirater.h and change the APPIRATER_APP_ID to your apps software id. You can also change the other #defines, for a more customized reminder message and buttons, but the default should suffice for most apps.

Now every time the user launches your app, Appirater will see if they’ve used the app for 30 days and launched it at least 15 times. If they have, they’ll be asked to rate the app, and then be taken to your app’s review page in the App Store. If you release a new version of your app, Appirater will again wait until the new version has been used 15 times for 30 days and then prompt the user again for another review. Optionally, you can adjust the days to wait and the launch number by changing DAYS_UNTIL_PROMPT and LAUNCHES_UNTIL_PROMPT in Appirater.h.

Code: http://github.com/arashpayan/appirater/

BTW, if you like Appirater, please consider checking out my game, Jabeh or the lite version of it.

APXML: NSXMLDocument ’substitute’ for iPhone/iPod Touch

Arash — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:04:45 +0000

After spending some time working on Jabeh, my latest creation for iPhone/iPod Touch, I’m taking some time to dump a little learned knowledge into my blog.

In my first app, my XML needs weren’t that great, so putting up with the lack of NSXMLDocument in the iPhone SDK was not a big deal. However, in Jabeh I was changing the XML format so often and using so much of it for my network communication creating delegates for NSXMLParser quickly became a huge time sink. After a little hacking, I came up with APXML to solve my DOM problem. It’s not a perfect implementation of the W3C XML 1.0 standard, but it’s close enough for a lot of usage. One particular shortcoming is its lack of support for namespaces but maybe somebody else can add that support. If you just want to jump in and start using it (LGPL license), you can get the code from github:

http://github.com/arashpayan/apxml/

Most of my XML manipulation experience has been with various Java libraries (org.w3c.dom interface, JDOM and XOM), and the only one that I enjoyed using was XOM, because of its simplicity and licensing. Almost all of my design decisions were based on how XOM does things.

Let’s say we want to represent the following XML document in memory using APXML:

    id="1" author="Michael Pollan">The Omnivore’s Dilemma

    id="2" author="Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes">Computer Graphics: Principles and Practices

In code, we do the following:

#import "APXML.h"

@implementation AppDelegate
- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {

    // create the document with it’s root element

    APDocument *doc = [[APDocument alloc] initWithRootElement:[APElement elementWithName:@"books"]];

    APElement *rootElement = [doc rootElement]; // retrieves same element we created the line above

    // create the first book entry (The Omnivore’s Dilemma)

    APElement *book1 = [APElement elementWithName:@"book"];

    [book1 addAttributeNamed:@"id" withValue:@"1"];

    [book1 addAttributeNamed:@"author" withValue:@"Michael Pollan"];

    [book1 appendValue:@"The Omnivore's Dilemma"];

    [rootElement addChild:book1];

    // create the second book entry (Computer Graphics)

    APElement *book2 = [APElement elementWithName:@"book"];

    [book2 addAttributeNamed:@"id" withValue:@"2"];

    [book2 addAttributeNamed:@"author" withValue:@"Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes"];

    [rootElement addChild:book2];

}
@end

And if we want to convert the document to an NSString*, we use one of the two methods in APDocument:

    // converts the xml to a compact string with no newlines or tabs (good for production)

    NSString *xml = [doc xml];

    // converts the xml to an easy to read string with newlines and tabs (good for debugging)

    NSString *prettyXML = [doc prettyXML];

Often times when I’m working with XML, I like to see what the current element contains, so for added convenience, you can obtain an XML string containing the element you’re working with, its attributes and all its children directly from the APElement by calling one of two methods:

- (NSString*)prettyXML:(int)tabs;

- (NSString*)xml;

Now for the best part of the library, which is the ability to read in XML and represent it in APXML. All you have to execute is one simple line:

    APDocument *doc = [APDocument documentWithXMLString:xmlString];

Hopefully this will be helpful to other developers out there. I may post another article soon if anybody has some questions.

UPDATE Sep 5, 2009: Here’s an example that demonstrates traversing the XML document.

    APElement *rootElement = [doc rootElement];

    NSLog(@"Root Element Name: %@", rootElement.name);

    // get all the child elements (each book)

    NSArray *childElements = [rootElement childElements];

    for (APElement *child in childElements)

    {

        // returns the tag name

        NSLog(@"Child Name: %@", child.name);

        // reads the attribute named ‘author’

        NSLog(@"Author: %@", [child valueForAttributeNamed:@"author"]);

        // returns the text content of the element

        NSLog(@"Title: %@", [child value]);

    }

In the console you’ll see (I’ve removed the NSLog markup):

Root Element Name: books
Child Name: book
Author: Michael Pollan
Title: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Child Name: book
Author: Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes
Title: Computer Graphics: Principles and Practices

Arash Payan | Blog » objective-c

Presenting, Appirater

APXML: NSXMLDocument ’substitute’ for iPhone/iPod Touch