Augur, Version 2.0 – Coming Soon

So this just happened earlier in the morning.

I’ve been working on an update to the Augur App, but it took a back seat for a long while. There were some reports of a login problem that I was never able to reproduce, and a part of me just didn’t like the whole login process anyhow. It was cumbersome for one, and also prevented anyone who didn’t have a Twitter account from using the app.

Among the side projects I got into recently, I started messing around a bit more with Node.js, and got more familiar with hosting content on Heroku. I also dabbled a little bit into MongoDB, and did some very basic work with Amazon S3.

I’m really happy to announce that I’ve shifted a lot of the heavy lifting away from the phone and it’s all being done server-side. I’m using Node on Heroku to do all the searching on Twitter, and pretty much dancing up to the API rate limit of 180 requests every 15 minutes.

While this is going on, I use MongoDB to house all my search terms (and also as a temporary storage location). Ultimately, I take all the search results I find, clean them up a bit, and create a JSON file that I send over to Amazon for storage.

There may be a better way than this, but it was the cheapest/easiest approach I could find in the short term.

The biggest benefit of this approach is that it eliminates the need for the user to have a Twitter account to use the app. Now anyone can just grab the app, fire it up, and still see all the predictions/statements without having to log in with any credentials.

Though I’m sad it took so long for me to return to this app, I’m really jazzed to have learned a lot in the interim and to be able to apply it here. The app is still incredibly minimal, but everything under the hood has significantly changed (and for the better, I feel).

To top things off, I decided to make the app free. I sold a small amount, but honestly – I started to wonder whether I really wanted to charge or not for the app. I’ve spent a lot of time on it, but ultimately I decided that I’d rather have more people see it and use it. Obscurity being the bigger challenge, right?

The app was submitted for review this morning, so fingers crossed that it gets approved quickly. Once it goes live, I’ll post another note here… and probably update the actual app website to note that it’s now free. And I think I’ll just post up a PayPal/Donation button, and count anything that comes from that a win.

Oh yeah, and hopefully I can suss out how to create an Android version. I’m going to look into Phonegap Build – which I’ve never used before. I’ll keep you posted.

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