taking joy in fixing a badly broken LJ app

After the latest LJ release, I got a few emails saying LJ for WebOS was badly broken, and lo and behold they were right.

I was not excited about fixing the app, since I knew the code for parsing posts, which is most of what broke, was pretty brittle and terrible. (c.f. “don’t parse HTML pages with hand-written state machines”) And I don’t even use the app much anymore, and it’s certainly not going to sell many more copies since it only works on webOS phones, which are not exactly flying off the shelves, and new ones might not exist. So I toyed with the idea of dropping support entirely, but that just felt wrong, even though I’d rather be working on new shiny apps for Windows Phone 7.

Last night I took the first serious stab at fixing things, and it turned out to be much more fun than I had hoped. The app was so nonfunctional it felt like writing a whole new one, and it turns out the new page format is a bit nicer to parse to boot. So I’ve fixed maybe 60% of the issues already, and hopefully I can fix the rest by next week sometime (pending New Year’s festivities) and get back to WP7.

LJ for WebOS: the saga ends!

After my last LJ for WebOS adventure, I was a bit down. But, I look at the App Catalog today, and the most recent review has been upgraded from 1 star to 3 with the text: “A recent update has greatly improved the readability of the themes, so is[sic] that’s what put you off before I suggest taking another look.”

Yay! Thanks, random person!

Salvaging the looks of LJ for WebOS

An excerpt from the most recent review of LJ for WebOS: “…most recent update has made it so ugly that it is unusable.” This makes me sad!

So – here’s my plan:
– the most recent update added themes, some of which are not terrible (I think). So I added a dialog box on first launch that points this out and makes it easy to try them.
– I also created a “plain” theme (see the first screenshot on the LJ for WebOS page, so if you really hate every one of the other themes, at least you can fall back to that one. I also made it the default theme, which made me a little sad but people can always change it if they want.

Here’s hoping this will make people happy! Of course, people rarely go back and change their reviews so I’m probably stuck with that one…

LJ for WebOS update

The good news: Since my last update, I’m up to 132 copies sold. I’ve added some new features, including the heavily-requested thumbnails in posts, and I made a video walkthrough of the app that’s linked to from the App Catalog. (which is a cool feature – thanks Palm!)

The bad news: The rate of sales is really slowing down – this last week I had three days in a row where no copies were sold, which is the first time that’s happened since I’ve been tracking the daily numbers. Pushing the update helped a little, but I’m getting a feeling that the market may be somewhat saturated – the intersection of “people who own a Pre” and “people who use LiveJournal enough that they’re willing to pay a few bucks for a good client” probably isn’t that big to begin with. Or maybe it’s just a blip; I suppose time will tell.

I was hoping that I might squeak in to the Palm Hot Apps competition, but looking at the leaderboard I’m a ways out from the #200 slot. Right now I’d have to sell 51 more copies to get on the list, and that’s only going to go up over time. Oh well!

In any case, I’ve had a lot of fun working on LJ for WebOS and I’m glad that people seem to generally find it useful. I’m hoping to publish my next app (the FlightCaster-based one) within a few weeks – it’s mostly ready to go but I’m waiting on some API changes before I call it done, and then I have to make a video, etc.

A post by someone on Palm’s developer relations team sums up well why I like WebOS so much and why I’m going to be a sad panda if it goes away.