Happy holidays everyone!
I thought I’d release a little tool today that I think will be useful to those of you doing iPhone application development. As you might know reviews for your applications in the iTunes App Store are specific to each country and at the moment Apple provides no way for application authors to easily browse reviews of the various international stores.
A few days ago I came across a solution by Erica Sadun on blogs.oreilly.com using a Perl script to scrape the reviews from the XML feed by spoofing the HTTP header. Flash Platform geek as I am, I thought this would be a perfect candidate for an AIR application and thats exactly what I did today.
The “iPhone App Reviews” AIR app was built using Flex and obviously runs on Windows, Mac and Linux — its about 250 lines of code and uses the SQLite and File APIs for those interested.
How does it work?
You paste in the URL of the application you want to check (right-click on an app in iTunes and choose “copy iTunes Store URL”), the AIR app then figures out the name of the application and adds it to the local SQLite database.
Once you’ve set up the applications you want to monitor you go to the “Check reviews” tab, select the application and what country you would like to see and click the “refresh” button.
If you want to save out the reviews you can click export and select where to save the text file.
Installation
Click “install now” on the AIR badge install below to install the application. Alternatively you can download the AIR file here (not recommended) in which case you need to make sure you have the AIR 1.5 runtime installed.
Note: This is still an early version of the application and not extensively tested yet. Consider this a workaround until Apple comes out with a better way to check your app reviews in the international iTunes stores.
I hope you enjoy the application, its provided as is and free of charge — if you do want to support feel free to buy one of my wacky digital clock experiments on the iTunes App Store.
31 Comments
Nice idea.
Hey cool!
BTW is your certificate for Air apps personal or a “company” one?
Merry Christmas, take care.
Hi Savvas, its a certificate registered on my business — heard about some company offering personal AIR certificates now that is pretty cool.
Yes thats why I asked..
Just in case anyone is interested here you can find more info:
http://eu.globalsign.com/company/press/150908-adobe-air.htm
(Sorry that I dont remember where I first read about that..)
Thanks Pet.
Hi Peter, looks great. But in my case there is sadly some issue, it won’t accept any iTunes-URL paste in there. The button just does nothing. Got a fresh install of the app over the internet from above, including direct Air installation. If there is anything I can provide you, please tell me.
Thanks for your effort already!
Andy
I tried the app, but when I paste in the url and click Add application the “Add application”-button goes grey and nothing more happens. I have tried it several times with the url for my game http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=299031911&mt=8
Thanks for the feedback guys — if the add button does not become enabled, seems to be a problem with the change event not firing. Can you try adding a blank space at the end and removing it again?
It should normally force the change event to fire and enable the button. I’ll look into the issue for you. Are you on Windows, Mac, Linux?
@Peter – I just checked the URL and it works for me “Lost in Space”, are you behind a restrictive firewall of some sort?
It could also be timing out for some reason, not doing any timeout error checking at the moment. I’ll try to get that addressed asap.
Thats what I did and it worked. Just “change” the URL and try again. It worked for me.
@Peter: I am on MacOS X 10.5.6, I can press the button, but nothing more happens. I can see 3 network requests coming up but nothing more, I am not behind a firewall.
That’s interesting — are you able to share the URL? Feel free to email me directly peter dot elst at gmail if you’d like me to take a closer look.
Its trying to figure out the name of the application as soon as you click the add button which it does by loading in the XML of the US store and parse that. It could be that the XML coming back is slightly different for your particular app and its choking on that.
By any chance are you trying to add an application that is not made available in the US store?
I have the same problems than others. Maybe there is problem with non-US iTunes store. For example there is link to iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=298074242&mt=8
Thanks Richard, that link works for me — iChess (evaluation), I’m still trying to put my finger on the problem. I’m based in Belgium myself so its not a location based problem.
Does adding any other random application work for you? Also, did you try the Perl script that Erica Sadun blogged about (see link in the blog post). Would be very interested to hear if that one works for those of you that are having problems.
I’m having the same problems as well.
I tried 2 different apps and neither one works:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284949365&mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=293668646&mt=8
Can those of you having problems try if the Perl script by Erica works for you — that would be a great help to track down the issue.
The Flex code I’m using is pretty much a straight port from that. Also, if you can post what operating system you are using that would help me narrow it down.
Here’s a little update for those of you having problems — I’ve been able to reproduce the issue on Windows, Mac users seem to be fine.
Also a web-based version of the same code runs fine so it seems to be related to an AIR runtime problem. I’ll try to find a workaround asap. Thanks!
I am having the same problem here on a _Mac_. This is the url I am trying to check:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=298064125
Hi Ernest, thanks for testing — the link you’re trying to use is not the link to a single application but to a list of your apps.
Try if this direct link to your app works for you:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=298064122&mt=8
@Peter
I´m not behind a restrictive firewall, using Mac OS X 10.5.6 on a new Macbook Pro. Adding and removeing whitespace after the URL enables the button again, but I can´t get anything to appear in the Application Name coloumn.
Best regards
Peter
(Sorry for copying your nickname!)
Thanks for the feedback everyone, unfortunately quite a few of you are having problems with the application — I’m currently working on an update that works around the issues.
I’ll make sure it gets tested thoroughly to avoid a repeat of this situation and will release it on this blog asap.
Peter,
like your app. It would be even better if it would also display the star rating of each post. And it ‘d be convenient if it ‘d display only countries that actually have any comments.
Great idea, but does not work here (last version of macosx / air).
The URL I used is : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=293365321&mt=8
But I tried others without success, also tried the tricks mentionned in comments. Anyway, thank you for the great work, hope the update will fix this issue on my mac (I’ll try to find a PC to test the app on it).
@Peter
No unfortunately this link does still not work for me. Anything else I could check?
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Hi Peter,
any news about this nice application? i still have some problems in running it. Thanks
Great idea Peter thank you so much. Have you any plans to including looping functionality where it will parse reviews for all countries at once?
Works great overall. Thanks again.
The review application works great. Do you have an application to get the ranking from everey appstore (total and genre) aswell.
Thanks