Better URL’s for your apps

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

One minor issue when directing people to your apps on the App Store is the long and hard to read urls that iTunes employs for its content. This is all fine if you’re just providing a direct link to your app on a web page but if you want a more human readable url to give out you need to do something custom. I think there’s a shorter url scheme for apps in the App Store as well but I’m not positive and I can’t seem to find it so I’m posting another solution.

I noticed in a recent tweet by ngmoco that they were directing people to their recently released Elimate game using this url: http://appstore.ngmoco.com/eliminate/. I’m not sure if they’re using the method I’m going to describe but this is one way you can accomplish this “nicer” url redirect.

So what you need to do is first determine/create the domain/sub domain you want to use for this. I ended up using http://appstore.statik.ca/.

Then create a .htaccess file and put the following lines in (obviously replacing the urls with your own, and adding/removing as many lines as you need).

Redirect 301 /closet/ http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your app]

Redirect 301 /closetlite/ http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your app]

Redirect 301 / http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your company]

The first two lines are for both of my applications Closet (http://appstore.statik.ca/closet/) and Closet Lite (http://appstore.statik.ca/closetlite/). The third line is for anyone hitting http://appstore.statik.ca/ directly which takes them to all the apps I have on the App Store. It’s important to note to place this line last after all sub directory redirects you might have otherwise it won’t redirect properly.

After you have your .htaccess file created just upload it to your domain of choice and you now have nice readable urls to give out for your applications.

Why I’m glad Little Bugger isn’t finished yet.

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Just thought I’d spit out a couple reasons why I’m actually happy that I haven’t had time to finish Little Bugger yet. I’ve made a lot of progress but not enough to warrant a release.

The first reason is the leaderboards. Right now I’m using the cocos live leaderboard solution. While this is a great solution, there’s something to be said about using a solution which translates across many other games such as OpenFeint. So I’ve decided to implement this solution instead so if you’ve already played a game that uses OpenFeint and you’ve connected your device to the service the high score submissions will be automatic and require little to no effort on the users end. This solution also requires less custom coding on my part to handle all the score submissions. So if I did manage to finish the game months ago I probably would have kept the cocos live solution and wanted to switch it over at this point which would mean all the high scores up to that point would be lost.

The second reason is motivation. When I do manage to find some spare time I don’t always feel like working on Little Bugger or for that matter coding at all. So the best thing to do in this mindset – don’t code. The work will only suffer if you’re not totally into what you’re doing. When I really feel like working on it and get excited, that’s when I do my best work. So following this small personal guideline will only make the game better in the long run.

So those are the main two reasons why I’m glad I haven’t released the game yet. Whether you care or not I’m not sure but I just felt like writing about something. More Little Bugger and new game project updates to come.

Closet 1.3 Update

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

The Closet & Closet Lite 1.3 update is now live in the app store.

You can now:

• Swipe outfit cells to delete them.
• Swipe an outfits date cells to delete them.
• Swipe packing list cells to delete them.
• Swipe favorite outfit cells to remove them as favorites.
• Swipe outfit cells in the calendar to remove them from that date.
• Delete multiple items at once when viewing a list of thumbnails.
• Duplicate outfits so creating similar outfits with only slight modifications is much faster now.
• Duplicate packing lists.
• Email packing lists.

More new stuff:

• Added a News section (what you’re reading right now) to the Tools which will display any relevant info pertaining to Closet.
• While viewing an item in fullscreen mode you can now view all the outfits that contain that item.
• When viewing the “All” categories your outfits and items are now ordered in the same order as your categories.
• Deleting items when viewing them in fullscreen mode will no longer kick you back to thumbnail view after each delete.
• Updated icon.
• Bug fixes.