DigitMarket™ API Developer Portal | Torry Harris

September 4, 2008: @Apple Removed "Pull My Finger" Application #podcast #technology #history

Apple

2008– A letter was published from the creator of “Pull my Finger” iPhone application from Apple. The program was simple – you pull the finger and a sound was created (You can guess the sound). The letter read:

We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be…

We’ve been working on a lot of new features for the developer portal backend.  I thought it would be nice to go over the ones that are live this week so that every indie dev can get the most out of our portal.

Our first change is under your studio profile tab and lets you track all of ‘your’ pages as a game developer across IndieGameStand.

See that tracking code field? If you add your Google Analytics tracking code you will be able to track all of the visitors on your game pages, studio page etc.  You can use your existing domain and track them under that or you can create a new code with Google and track it independently of your game studio website.  Here is where you get your Google Analytics code from their dashboard:

I think this feature is really useful since it allows developers to better control and analyze their game’s performance, views, unique visitors, conversion rate, etc.  Google Analytics is a powerful tool and I’m happy that developers will be able to better track our community’s engagement with their games and products.

Your game cover image is very important so we moved it to the top and now support gifs

The game blurb is also a new thing that you can add to your game.  It should be a short 140 character or less description/summary of the game.  Right now, we are just using it on our featured deal page but we hope to use it more throughout the site in the future so if you have a good tagline, be sure to add it.

The other changes come to the actual game listing part of our developer portal.  We now have full TinyMCE integration with your game description and game page content.  That means that you can have better control of all the content that you put in your game description.  You can embed videos, add images, and better format your page with lists, paragraphs, links and more.

Remember to Preview your game page before you list your game to make sure that your images and videos aren’t too big.  Our pages detect whether or not you have used this new feature so they will either output the old text description only or output your HTML if you use the new GUI TinyMCE editor.

We have also redone our press tab so that developers can submit any link.  If we have the website in our database, the site’s logo will appear – otherwise we created a default image for websites that cover indie games that we may have missed (we want to support the indie sites too!).

The Press/Blog man is our default image if we dont have a site logo in our press list.

Finally, the tagging system that has been in the developer portal is actually live on the site now so be sure to tag your games.  

Whenever you see a tag pop-up like this – that means it is an approved ‘recommended’ tag in our database. This usually means that other games have been tagged with this term meaning that it will appear higher in the popular tags list on the site.

Developers are also allowed to create their own tags by typing in whatever they want, these madeup tags will be live instantly and can eventually become approved and suggested to other developers (if they are popular).

That does it for the changes that are currently live on the site, but we are working on some other new things that I hope to post about soon. Until then be sure to leave us any bug reports and suggestions in the comments or tweet @indiegamestand.