Tool for Posting NZ Games on Wednesday Mornings
Hey dudes,
Given some really strange drama surrounding posting NZ threads on Wednesday morning, I figured I'd make it as easy as possible for absolutely anyone to post NZ games. It's a little tricky as unlike games that are out in the US and are on AppShopper (so appinfo works) you've got to manually pull everything over. It's a bit of a headache, and sort of annoying, so I automated it. Again, just to emphasize this again, anyone can use this. If you switch your App Store region over to New Zealand early Wednesday morning and start snooping around and see something cool and want to make a thread DO IT!
Here's the link to the tool I made: http://elihodapp.com/thread-o-matic/
It's very much 1.0 right now but it will take any iTunes link and grab data from iTunes to form a forum post. One assumption it makes which I'm not sure what else I can do about yet is it puts a country tag in the thread title if you input a non-US iTunes link. It's specifically looking for the /nz/ in the URL to add [NZ] to the thread title. I made it this way intentionally as if there's a weird soft launch in Australia or something and you feed it an Australian iTunes link it'll add [AU] to the thread title field.
Otherwise, it grabs all relevant data, links, whether or not it has Game Center, all the screenshots, and everything else. This should save us all a lot of time.
Enjoy!
edit: Oh there's really only two known issues right now- It looks very specifically for normal iTunes links, i.e. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toucharcade-best-new-games/id509945427?mt=8 any of the shortened iTunes links won't work as it needs the country in it (in that case, "/us/") to know where to pull the game data from. Additionally, it's not pulling screenshots for iPad only games at the moment as the way iPad only game screenshot URL's are stored in the JSON Apple sends is annoying.
Given some really strange drama surrounding posting NZ threads on Wednesday morning, I figured I'd make it as easy as possible for absolutely anyone to post NZ games. It's a little tricky as unlike games that are out in the US and are on AppShopper (so appinfo works) you've got to manually pull everything over. It's a bit of a headache, and sort of annoying, so I automated it. Again, just to emphasize this again, anyone can use this. If you switch your App Store region over to New Zealand early Wednesday morning and start snooping around and see something cool and want to make a thread DO IT!
Here's the link to the tool I made: http://elihodapp.com/thread-o-matic/
It's very much 1.0 right now but it will take any iTunes link and grab data from iTunes to form a forum post. One assumption it makes which I'm not sure what else I can do about yet is it puts a country tag in the thread title if you input a non-US iTunes link. It's specifically looking for the /nz/ in the URL to add [NZ] to the thread title. I made it this way intentionally as if there's a weird soft launch in Australia or something and you feed it an Australian iTunes link it'll add [AU] to the thread title field.
Otherwise, it grabs all relevant data, links, whether or not it has Game Center, all the screenshots, and everything else. This should save us all a lot of time.
Enjoy!
edit: Oh there's really only two known issues right now- It looks very specifically for normal iTunes links, i.e. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toucharcade-best-new-games/id509945427?mt=8 any of the shortened iTunes links won't work as it needs the country in it (in that case, "/us/") to know where to pull the game data from. Additionally, it's not pulling screenshots for iPad only games at the moment as the way iPad only game screenshot URL's are stored in the JSON Apple sends is annoying.
Last edited by Eli; 11-05-2014 at 05:04 PM.
