

Tell HN: I released my open source iPhone AppStore Sales Graphing Tool - maxklein
http://maxklein.github.com/AppSalesGraph/

======
basil
I released a GAE app which does something similar. However it differs in that
it is automated and it emails you a daily digest of your sales, upgrades and
current rankings. In the email are also graphs of your sale and upgrade
history. I've been using it successfully for several months now. It's also
written in Python and on GitHub. :) <http://github.com/baz/app-sales-machine>

~~~
maxklein
That's pretty cool. I'll see if there are parts from your project that I can
steal. You know what I'd love your project to do? To post the sales report to
google wave. I wonder how hard that would be. Can you estimate?

~~~
basil
I think you would have to build a Wave Gadget. Would be pretty cool because
then you would have the functionality of the playback scrubber to see what
your sales graphs looked like at any point in time.

It would probably take a couple of days to open up a service on the server-
side, and to write the client-side graph generation. Not sure if a Wave Gadget
can pre-emptively fetch data without user interaction though. That might be a
killer.

~~~
maxklein
Can wave gadgets not render standard html? I never thought of the scrubber
thing, but you're right, it would be pretty nifty.

Is it not possible to simply push the current html you have into a wave?

~~~
basil
Wave Gadgets are HTML/JS. I was concerned that an external source (i.e. App
Sales Machine) would not be able to affect the contents of a Wave Gadget
unless there was some direct user-interaction with the Gadget inside the Wave.

Any experience Wave Gadget builders want to chime in? Is this possible?

~~~
maxklein
I just looked it up:
[http://code.google.com/p/imdbotty/source/browse/trunk/gadget...](http://code.google.com/p/imdbotty/source/browse/trunk/gadget.html)

It seems that the html is server-side preprocessed before being displayed in
the gadget, if I am correct in assuming those are template tags. So that would
not be a limitation.

I wanted to install your tool, but it is an inconvenient tool to use if you a
lot of apps. Why don't you just pull the app ids out of the sales file and
generate the dictionary that way? Tnen it would work well with multiple apps.

~~~
basil
App Sales Machine also scrapes your app's rankings, so that config file is
used to generate the URLs to scrape. From there, I relied on it to help
organise the way the data is persisted in the data store. I suppose it could
be modified to parse everything it needed from the sales reports, but you
would still need to configure every app's category info for the rankings
scraper. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but this is the method I
settled on.

------
maxklein
At the bottom of the site I've listed a bunch of things I'm planning for the
future. If anyone can come up with ideas on what would make for a really good
sales grapher, please do comment.

~~~
azsromej
Looks nice, max. I thought I'd finally be able to see what some of your apps
were but alas, no!

