8 ms·
The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant
- andrys 16y agoHow did you manage to scrap the Apple Store? Are you storing all the apps data locally? I guess it would be a huge overhead to send each of these queries to Apple...
- bballbackus 16y agoHaha I see your logic. Guy creates ytinstant.com, gets hired by google. You create App Store Instant, and (hopefully) get hired by apple.
- judofyr 16y agoEhm, the logic is right there in the headline: The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant
- code_duck 16y agoI'm not supporting the above statement, and the blithe logic it displays, but I can't go along with this, either. If that is as deep as the analysis of motivations goes on Hacker News, none of you should ever be allowed to vote.
- bhjodokast 16y agoCan you explain to the rest of us what the problem is? Personally it's great! Developers are getting notice in the world. Doesn't sound like a problem to me, and if someone hires him for his programming prowess, that's great! Are you reading sarcasm into the original post? That's my guess.
- code_duck 16y agoI'd love to respond to the below (dead) post and the thoughtful dorks who downvoted me, so might as well reply to myself. I don't care why he wrote this application. My point is that you can't just say "LOOK HE SAYS WHY RIGHT THERE, THAT'S WHY!" and have any sort of intellectual credibility, unless the intellectual credibility of a third grader is what you're aiming for.
- chris24 16y agoThe JavaScript (and a bit of the CSS) looks awfully similar to iTunes Instant which was released a few days ago: http://labs.stephenou.com/itunes http://labs.stephenou.com/itunes Edit: according to a few people I've heard from, Stephen (creator of iTunes Instant) did help out / supply some of the code for App Store Instant. My mistake. :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- charlesju 16y agoMy game GloSnake isn't showing up :(
- jat850 16y agoWhen I searched for GloSnake, it showed up briefly and then disappeared. I can't seem to get it to come back again. (edit) When getting as far as "Glos", it shows up. If I type beyond that, it seems to disappear.
- jacquesm 16y agoI have 'instant' overload.
- gojomo 16y agoTime for a 'slow search' movement to go with 'slow food' and 'slow news'!
- ThomPete 16y agoI have been wanting to do a slowfeed movement for years
- panacea 16y agoAssuming you're not simply being facetious, what would that look like? Some sort of meta-rss feed that delivers a 'best-of' for weekend perusal? Perhaps it could be collated/curated and then printed in a handy offline version for weekend digestion?
- btilly 16y agowhat would that look like? http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/
- ThomPete 16y agoIt would look much different than "best of". I imagine the principles to be 1. Look for weak signals (i.e. some random post about some random subject area) 2. Monitor to see whether it gains traction up slowly but surely (i.e. not your typical HN burst algo but something that might be months or years to pick up) 3. Deliver to user before it peaks but after it has reached some momentum.
- feross 16y agoMy friend built http://ytsloth.com http://ytsloth.com as a parody of my http://ytinstant.com http://ytinstant.com.
- 16y ago
- magic5227 16y agoI just want to point out, re: all these "instant" things, Google instant is useful not because its instant, but because its finishing queries for you. Partial queries are not useful. My 2cents
- jsatok 16y agoI agree with you. I didn't build App Store Instant as a replica of Google Instant. With the APIs available, there isn't a reliable way to predict apps. I built it because iTunes is slow. Try searching iTunes and clicking on an App (to read the description). It takes me 5+ seconds. This takes ~1 second.
- magic5227 16y agoYea not this specifically, just in general.
- joshd 16y agoAre you logging your queries? If you have enough searches you could build your own predictions. You're also proxying results, so you could use those to build an index too.
- jsatok 16y agoI am logging queries. Do you have any tips/suggestions as to how to do my own predictions?
- yesbabyyes 16y agoFor each prefix, which app are people eventually satisified with? E.g. if "in" often leads to instapaper, predict that, while if "ins" often eventually leads to "instantapp", that's the prediction for that prefix.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- martingordon 16y agoThe thing that sets this one apart from the others is that it can actually generate revenue (via affiliate links).
- theprodigy 16y agoWill this be a new hacker news meme or something? Being bored or current search tool on site is slow so I built (Insert Name) Instant.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoThere are worse memes than actually building something.
- eclark 16y agoIt seems to be missing some of the apps that I can find from the itunes store. We Rule isn't showing up. While another of the We series is. I like the design a lot simple, fast, and calming.
- aresant 16y agoAlthough I've got "instant overload" too this is the first of the instant apps with a built in, scalable business model - each of the links on this site is iTunes / linksynergy affiliate enabled - that's truly smart :)
- jsatok 16y agoThanks. I'm excited to see how it scales!
- aresant 16y agoShare when you get some data :)
- fabiandesimone 16y agoI need to contact you, but your contact us form is not working. Any other way?
- jsatok 16y agojordan (at) appoftheday (dot) com EDIT: Fixed the contact form, thanks for pointing that out!
- marklubi 16y agoFWIW, you may want to test the linksynergy links through a non-US proxy. I implemented linksynergy on our app's marketing site to hopefully glean an extra 5% on the sales, instead we found there was a bug where international users were being dumped into an infinite redirect loop. The issue occurred a few months ago but after losing a large amount of sales overseas before we tracked down the problem, we decided we would rather have better control over our sales channel than the extra 5%. It would take us more than 6 months of sales via linksynergy to make back what we lost in the short time the issue was occurring. It's not worth the risk for us. Also, it would be nice to find search results for iPad apps and to be able to browse beyond the initial 9 apps that are displayed.
- meric 16y ago
- gonk 16y agoNeeds categories.
- akadien 16y agowww.instantdomainsearch.com has been doing the instant lookup thing for a while.
- asnyder 16y agoNot to mention Domize (http://www.domize.com http://www.domize.com). I remember using them years ago, I still love it. It's funny, since I can't stand Google Instant, but really enjoy Domize, interesting how that works.
- phoenix24 16y agohttp://domai.nr/ http://domai.nr/ too is an instant domains lookup, and is pretty good at it.
- city41 16y agoWhat we really need is a better app store interface on the iPad. Apple's implementation is terrible[1]. AppShopper shows it would be possible to do. I'd even pay money for such an app. The app could include "spotlight apps" too, as another source of revenue. [1] It is terrible because it always resets itself to the beginning everytime you launch it. Couple that with the fact that installing an app causes the app store to close, means you just can't search around very effectively on it. Simple example: navigate to the third page of top apps, find an app you like, install it, go back to the app store, you've been pushed back to the first page and have to redrill down to page three to keep perusing.
- stevenwei 16y agoAgreed. Browsing is especially difficult when you click on an app to find out more details about it, click back when you're done, and then find that you've been kicked back to page one. Unfortunately I think this is one of the places where you're likely to get rejected by Apple for 'duplicating built in functionality', even if you've improved upon it, so I doubt anyone is going to do it
- forgottenpaswrd 16y agoAgreed.
- bgray 16y agoI also have instant overload but I must admit, this is one of the better instant apps I've seen! And no begging for a job. :)
- mortenjorck 16y agoExcellent work! Feature suggestion: iPad / iPhone filtering.
- jsatok 16y agoGreat suggestion. I thought about doing tabs when building it, but wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Any ideas?
- ajg1977 16y agoNice idea but worthless results I'm afraid. "secret of monkey island" - no hit, suggestions have none of these words. "air video" - no hit, though at least suggestions include air. "best camera" - ditto.
- jsatok 16y agoWas a bug affecting apps that have spaced in them. Fixed! (Air Video still doesn't show on top when you type Air Video as apparently Apple's iTunes API is ranking Air Mouse Pro higher)
- simplify 16y agoI typed in "go" and SmartGo Pro was the first result. Impressive.
- mikecane 16y agoOK, it's not working comprehensively. I think the search term "book" should bring up waaaaay more than the 9 results I'm getting!
- jsatok 16y agoIt's just a preview of the first 9 results. Apple only returns back a limited number. I need to find a better way of displaying if there are more than the 9 results. Any ideas?
- mikecane 16y agoOK, too bad Apple limits it like that. It really kills its usefulness then. Books in the App Store (aside from the ePubs in the iBookstore) is a rat's nest that's hell to wade through on the desktop. An Instant like this would really help with that.
- newobj 16y agoNice, too bad I don't shop the App Store by keyword search.
- mkramlich 16y agovery snappy, well done! it found all but one of my published iPhone apps, and very quickly, like Google Instant. Of course, one huge advantage you have is less traffic. And you've got less to render. You may also be showing more of a cached, less real-time view of what's actually in the store (guess).
- bobwaycott 16y agoMy two cents ... I find the results often unexpected as a result of matching a search term to several app fields. I search the word "instant" and receive AIM as the top result (presumably because AIM is an "instant" messenger application). Same thing occurs due to matching against developer names, causing what I'd consider to be false (or 'less true') matches to show up because the string matches a developer name, and yet matching app names are lower in the match results, even though the string is in the app name--and often the beginning of the app name. It'd be worthwhile to consider tightening the parameters. I'd wager a typical user performing an instant search is not searching by developer name. I'd further wager an average user is searching by keyword and description less frequently on an 'instant' search than by app name. So perhaps you could try a bit of weighting, pushing X app name matches higher in the results, followed by X description matches, followed by X developer name matches. Perhaps tweak the UI to reflect this. And, of course, I could be completely wrong and this is all just a matter of my expectations not being fulfilled after searching.