wootvetica Updates

Woohoo, wootvetica just passed the 1000 downloads mark! Exactly 1001 as of this morning. Took long enough

The App is currently the fifth result when searching for “woot” on the App Store and it’s gotten a 4.5/5 rating. All good things.

 

I also released wootvetica 1.1 on the 21st, and it’s gotten around 500 downloads so far which pleases me. 1.1 adds

• Sharing features
• The ability to see the discussion links for various products
• Better parsing of product descriptions (particularly with embedded images)
• A custom image viewer to provide an in-depth look at products.

I’ve got a slew of features lined up for 1.2 which I’m slowly working on implementing. I’m going to be adding some sort of deferred reminders so that the App doesn’t always bother you late at night, I’ll be switching from OHAttributedLabel to TTTAttributed label, and I’ll be changing the name from wootbetica to Wootie. Push notifications are still in the works for a future release.

 

Let me know what you think and what you’d like to see added or changed!

FaceType

I’ve started getting into typography lately, and while I am still a novice I decided to start building an App showcasing the beauty of fonts. The App is named FaceType, a play on words of both the FaceTime product and the word Typeface. It’s open source, available here on github.

It’s iPad- and portrait-only right now because that’s sort of the way I envisioned it, though I’ve added some hooks in the code to fix that (switching both off doesn’t completely kill the experience right now).

I’ve also started downloading a whole bunch of fonts, mostly from dafont.com, to put in the App. I may add the program I’m using to do that as well in time.

Check it out! It’s pretty. Don’t know if it’s App Store bound or not.

Introducing wootvetica

I’m growing increasingly tired of the time it takes to perform small tasks in Apps on the iOS. CheckIn originally embodied this by making it so you could check in on multiple social networks from one App in seconds flat. NGadget was no slouch here, prefetching content and laying it out to avoid user click (*cough* tap)-throughs left and right as well as caching like crazy. I’m taking the Windows Phone “glance and go” point of view on in future tijo Apps, things should be lightning fast and actively work on behalf of Joe User. I’m launching an App with this in mind today.

Introducing wootvetica, a Woot client with style

The App takes the chromeless styling from NGadget and applies it to daily Woot deals. It targets a few things I hate about other Woot apps.

1. Tabs Tabs Tabs

A lot of Woot Apps silo each Woot channel into a tab, upon launch users have to switch from tab to tab to tab refreshing at each. Upon launching wootvetica all the current deals are shown in the form of tiles complete with image, title, price, shipping and handling, and whether or not the item is sold out. There’s no tab switching and refreshing of individual tabs to see what the deals are, they’re all in one place so you don’t have to tap around. Deals are cached between sessions for offline viewing, and the descriptions of items are displayed with OHAttributedLabels in lieu of UIWebViews so there’s no additional pain there.

2. Forgot to check Woot, missed a deal

Woot deals (usually) turn around at the same time, midnight central time. Trouble is, I usually forget to check Woot for several hours or miss it for several days. I’ve missed deals I would’ve gladly cashed in on because they’ve sold out or I simply waited more than 24 hours to check.

Wootvetica currently takes advantage of the wonderfully low-tech local notification to simply remind users of new Woot deals. Because these are timed notifications this means that I don’t currently support Woot-Off notifications and I’m still unable to show whole product titles in notifications.

In the future I’ll be adding Push Notifications via Parse, and users will be able to be notified of Woot-Offs or new products without even having to open the app. You can turn all notifications off in the settings, naturally.

You can download it for free right here.