Appsd

As we know, one of the great innovations of IPhone is Appstore . It really made finding and installing apps easier. As of now there are more than 30,000 (Its 30444 while i am writing this article) iphone apps available in appstore. Installing an app is just a click away. Problem is finding apps. They solved this problem partially, by grouping the apps into categories or you can search for an app (IPhone search is getting improved greatly. It is definitely far better than couple of months back.) Both of these have some difficult. Lets say, some how you find an app and before buying the app you wanted to compare the similar apps. Now there is no straight forward way to do it. With appsd we tried to solve this problem.

The problem I faced frequently is, whenever I wanted to buy an app, I wanted to know the feedback and alternative applications to try out. Also whether there is any free version of that app available and other such information. I can read the comments for feedback but i find misleading many times.

Appsd tries to solve these problems. From last couple of months i have been working on the this project. (I work mostly an hour or two hours on this. That's the maximum time i can devote :) ) Appsd is a tool that lets you find related iphone applications and related articles. It achieves this by grouping all the similar applications together. The similarity between the apps is found by comparing the title and description. (designed as vector space model)

Related articles are found by using Yahoo boss API. We do normal search for that application and then we filter the results based on website. We maintain list of 45 websites and we show reveiws only from these websites. We do filter some of the results from these sites if we think they are not appropriate.

Site is hosted in Google Appengine. The main drawbacks is search. Appengine doesn't have sophisticated support for search. Now only games are present. I will upload rest of the apps in a week time. The name appsd came from apps + deamon.





References

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Applications/dp/0596529325 (Excellent book)
http://numpy.scipy.org/ (It can easily increase python speed by 7x)
http://code.google.com/p/scipy-cluster/
http://jquery.com/
http://www.blueprintcss.org/
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/corners
http://zooie.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/twitter-boss-real-time-search/
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/Web_Search.html
http://www.anujgakhar.com/2009/03/16/using-jquery-to-load-alternate-images