ReViewView

Your free alternative to Appfollow & Appfigures

Understanding your users feedback can be crucial to the success of your app, but accessing your user reviews can be quite cumbersome. ReViewView is here to help.

Take an arbitrary Play or App Store URL, import it to ReViewView and you are ready to browse all available app reviews. No additional setup is required.

ReViewView will display a high level overview of your Android or iOS apps, sectioned into the countries / languages that you want to monitor. You can search trough all available reviews, mark them as read and share them with your peers.

The app is currently available for free on the iOS App Store.

Building Stockable

Creating a Stock Portfolio Management Tool

Given a reasonable amount of knowledge about the stock market and having done my first few trades, the time was right to look at tooling to manage my investments.

The main thing I wanted to know being: how are my stocks doing? Am I turning a profit?

Naturally I turned to the app store to solve my woes and made a few observations:

  1. Stock monitoring apps are abundant.
  2. Most apps offer tons of functionality by surfacing most features of their underlining stock exchange.
  3. as a direct result their user experience is oftentimes questionable.
  4. Monitoring your specific orders is rarely an option.
  5. Native / modern looking trading apps are rare.

Starting from scratch I had a few goals in mind.

Be as close to the system as possible

The system being iOS, I aimed to implement Apples native SDKs before looking at 3rd party solutions. This lead me to take a closer look at CloudKit, Combine, DarkMode and SF Symbols.

Be as simple as possible

Starting by only offering the answer to one particular question: How is my portfolio doing today?

Aim to break even

Stock Market APIs aren’t free. Ignoring the initial development cost (i’d write those of as a learning experience), a reasonably successful app would end up creating a maintenance bill.
All options considered I ended up implementing ads into the app.

Stockable is now available on the AppStore (for english speaking countries). Take a look and drop a review If you enjoy using the app.

David

AppStore Review Monitor

Raise awareness of AppStore reviews in your company, by putting them front and center in your office.

Ever 30 seconds the AppStore Review Monitor will display a random review from the iOS AppStore, including the app version, and rating.

The top-left indicator will provide you with additional meta information, such as the average store rating and a trend arrow (telling you if your rating is improving over time).

You can setup the monitor by entering the following URL:

http://davidochmann.de/content/html/app-store-reviews/index.html?location=us&id=361304891

Please make sure to provide a valid id (you can copy those from the URL of Apples AppStore HTML pages) and the location code you want to monitor.

Hopefully this tool will provide you with a lot of useful insights and the occasional laugh.

Cheers,
David

trackme – Time tracking via file tracking

What did I do yesterday? When did I leave for lunch? How long did It take me to finish my last ticket?

Maybe you have one of those jobs where time tracking is a necessity, and if so, you can probably relate to the questions above.

But, time tracking is, oddly enough, time consuming. Even the best systems require you to minutely write down the start and end of every step of every project. This is not only inefficient, it is also hugely error prone.

In short, the whole process has the potential to be automated.

trackme (working title) is my attempt to optimize this problem, but this tool is not a time tracker, it is a file modification monitor.

trackme-4

The app keeps track of all your recently modified files, sorts and filters them and then displays a coherent list of start and end times for every session on your pc. All of your data is then saved into a local database.

trackme is currently available in a very early prototype state. You can download the mac app from the following url:
davidochmann.de/content/download/trackme/trackme-0.0.1.zip

Update

Alternatively you can now download the complete sourcecode from the follwoing github page:
https://github.com/MRWUT4/trackme

aape – The Adobe Animate PixiJS exporter

Hi everyone,

I’m thrilled to share my latest side project with you. I call it aape. It is my version of an Adobe Animate PixiJS exporter.

Here are two demos of exported animations:

aape - animation demo
runner - animation demo

How it works:

The project is split into two parts. A JSFL script to export your current Animate timeline and a few JS classes to download and display the animation.

Your animation is build as usual. The only difference being that you have to explicitly tell aape which part of the animation should be exported as Bitmap. This is done by selecting the MovieClip in your Animate library and changing it to a Graphics object.
This workaround allows you to use every filter option of Animates AS3 documents.

MovieClip labels and comments are also exported and can be used by executing the familiar gotoAndStop / gotoAndPlay methods.

After building your scene you execute aape form the toolbar. The export starts with the currently open MovieClip as root element.

A simple export generates three files. A PNG Atlas + JSON file containing image locations and a JSON object that describes the exported timeline (the library).
The files can than be loaded and added to the aape.Timeline object. It’s prototype is the PIXI.DisplayObject. So you can easily add it to your existing display list.
The tool is not yet finished. I’m still working on the Animate user interface with export settings as well as a proper documentation.

If you are interested in aape, feel free to try it yourself. You can find the complete repository here:

https://github.com/MRWUT4/pixijs-animation-export

What do you think?