So, from today we introduce the concept of trusted iusethis users. That means if you've registered a valid app, or added a good review to an app, we flag your user as trusted, so your releases and new apps will show up directly in the feeds. Otherwise, they will be held pending moderation from one of our admins.

Since the user filter was mostly added to counter spam apps appearing on the front page, we're also changing the default setting to show all trusted apps on the frontpage. You can still chose to browse at another usage level if you prefer.

We have also added the recent list to the iusethis contact page as a first step, and we are considering adding the Get Satisfaction Help Center as well. I find this to be a great use of OAuth, a protocol that has been of interest to me lately.

While I was updating the about pages, I also added a couple of new ones; The tools page is a list of stuff that people have built against our apis and feeds. I've probably forgot some, so feel free to remind me, and I'll get your stuff added to the list asap. I've also added a small info page for icrawlthis, our friendly neighborhood spider.

The most notable is the front page itself. One problem we've noticed is that the descriptions of the apps vary in length, so that some apps get more attention than others. We've now changed so that on the frontpage, only the start of the description shows up. We've also added a new field to the app edit/new screen, synopsis, which lets you customize the short description of your app. This change has also allowed us to display more apps per page, we've increased from 6 to 10 apps per page.

Another change that makes me happy is the New Releases RSS. We've added the changelog for the new release to the RSS, so that you can instantly see if it fixes anything you care about:

Additionally you can get a feed of updates to apps you use, which also contains this update. Available on your profile, by pressing the New Releases link.

Example-badge for AppFresh:

If there are any specific badge-need you guys have, this is where to give us feedback on it.

update We’ve added a profile badge that shows your loved apps on your blog as well. Feel free to add it and support your favorite apps :)

We've migrated from Wordpress to Moveabletype Open Source, which was recently released. As a Perl hacker, I feel much better about our blog being Perl based :) There are also other benefits, like working OpenID support, and for those of you who only want posts about the iusethis system, you can get our iusethis.com category RSS. If you want to subscribe to everything we write about, use this feed instead. :)

We've also taken the opportunity to push a much more dynamic user profile. When you click 'My profile' in the top menu, you can now see recent events on the iusethis with or without your contacts. Don't worry tho, you can still find the apps you're using under 'Used apps' in the profile menu. By default it will show the new totally k-rad 'iconbonanza' view. To get to the old default profile view, select 'list' view.

Expect to see more cool new features on iusethis and our other projects in the time to come. Take care, and thanks for supporting iusethis!

If you are interested in helping us beta test win.iusethis.com, please drop us a line at beta@iusethis.com.

This means that we're happily running under Solaris. Getting Catalyst up and running was a breeze, a testament to how well Sun has modernized their operating system in recent versions. Sun's new Cool Stack already contained most of the things we needed to get up and running.

In other news, our Facebook app is now also running under Solaris on one of Joyent's Facebook Accelerators (Free for the first year), probably the first Perl app to run there (They support Java, Ruby, Python and PHP out of the box, but not Perl). It's running under FastCGI, and getting it installed was a mere matter of installing the Catalyst modules (no problems whatsoever, just cpan Task::Catalyst, and config the apache web server to let the root of the virtual server be handled by the fastcgi script I didn't bother using their web console management, as I'm more comfortable on the command line.

Unfortunately, this means that you have been logged out, and in some cases, the browser can't handle this and doesnt set a new cookie when you log in. If this occurs, you will seem to be logged in as normal, but when you come to the next page, the top menu of iusethis still says 'Login' rather than 'My Profile' and 'Logout'. If this occurs, you can fix it by deleting the iusethis session cookie.

In Firefox, click the Firefox menu, choose Preferences, then click the Privacy icon in the settings, and choose 'Show cookies'. Type 'iusethis.com' in the search box, then choose the cookie named iusethis_session, and click Remove Cookie.

Uploaded with Skitch!

In Safari, the procedure is similar: Click the Safari menu, choose Preferences, then click the Security icon. Choose 'Show Cookies', type 'iusethis.com' in the search box. From the list, choose the 'iusethis_session' cookie, and click Remove.

Uploaded with Skitch!

If you follow this procedure, you should be able to log in again without problems. Otherwise, please contact us at support@iusethis.com. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Nothing beats the feeling when someone makes up a new way to use iusethis, or when we get mentioned at other blogs. So we are now ready to move into the bigger waters:

Facebook

We have created an official iusethis page and a facebook application for you to add on your profile.

Instead of showing other users how many internet tests you have done, show them that you are using a mac, and that it's stuffed with cool apps.

After you have provided your password and user name (don't worry, we keep it encrypted in a locked chest in arne's closet) it will connect to your profile and display all your hearted apps.

So, if you have improvements or suggestions, let us know. If you are happy, tell everyone else.

Someone at iusethis

PS: Weather forecast says that bigger waves are coming in... Be ready...

Application Developers: In order to enable this, just go to the edit app dialog and add a link to your appcast. Iusethis automatically will start checking your rss feed on a regular basis. If you provide a sparkle::releaseNotesLink, we will get the changes from that, otherwise we will use the rss description from the appcast feed.

Are you an app developer, and haven't checked ut Sparkle yet? It's a snap to implement, and there are several ways to easily generate the appcasts. For instance, you can use the PHP RSS Appcast Generator, or you can use SparkleCaster. If you prefer, automatically generates appcasts for all the apps, at http://osx.iusethis.com/appcast/<appname> (My favorite way of doing it ;)

ForkLift is an efficient way of approaching your files. You can look at both local and remote files (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 or even mobile devices over Bluetooth). A great app for anyone who has grown out of Finder, and are looking for more features.

Check it out on binarynights.]]> http://www.nordaaker.com/blog/2007/09/our-first-advertiser-forklift.html http://www.nordaaker.com/blog/2007/09/our-first-advertiser-forklift.html iusethis.com Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:18:09 +0100 We've been having some problems with duplicate apps recently. One source has been appfresh users not being able to identify the apps on their mac. We have been working together with the excellent people over at metaquark to solve this issue, and we think we've come up a pretty neat solution. We now alias the old name to the app whenever we merge or rename an app, so that you get a warning when you try to register that app later.

This is how it looks:

We also redirect any requests for /app/ and /appcast/. For instance, that means that appfresh can automatically find the correct application on iusethis to link to.

Doing this kind of stuff on the server-side is prefered for several reasons. For one, you are not dependent on the end-user being able to run your javascript. Another advantage is search engines index this data much more easily than clientside generated markup. In addition, you can cache the data for a period, so that you don't need to poll the server so often.