My Game Buddy 0.5

New Version released :

• Improved loading times.
• Permission Acquired to use site data
• Added better error handling for I.E. and Firefox
• Increased amount of data loaded from Zaps
• Misc other back end fixes

Keep the comments comming , thanks to those that commented already.

My Game Buddy 0.4

Ok finally updated the website to 0.4 , users can now search the respective sites live and data will be loaded.

Please note that data is only taken from the respective sites every 8 hours to prevent dos attacks. The rest of the time the data will be loaded from the database.

Also comments are now live and active , any comments sent will be sent to me.

Please leave a comment here if you have any other idea or such.

Making your mark

So not to long ago (a few months back) i created a web application that would allow me to track my fuel usage. While the application was pretty much public i never really announced it or blogged about it either. The reason for this was that while it worked fine , the application lacked polish and i had not implemented all the feature’s that i had intended to implement .

So a funny thing happened yesterday, while browsing through my list of rss feeds i came across a feed on Web Worker Daily about an application that basically did the same thing as mine but with a lot less functionality .The difference was that they had a lot more polish for the product (fuelfrog) with all the nice colors and stuff attached .Thinking back if had polished the app a bit more who knows it might have got a bit more limelight (provided i could come up with a better name than fuletracker).

So does it come down to who releases there product first or is it more about  who has the best looking product. I know this is a 2 sided coin because a lot of the general public like i pretty product that is  less functional  more than a ugly more functional product.

So to all those that did not know i have a released a semi beta/alpha fuel tracking application that will allow you to track the mileage and a bunch of other stuff ,  so there i said it.

Now lets just hope my other ideas don’t get taken by other people.

Scraping The Surface

Needs and ease of use is the basis for a lot of developments in this world, so since i had a need and i needed to do it easily i decided to start a small project that will hopefully obtain both for me.

The need : To buy games (if possible at the cheapest price)

Ease Of Use : To do it from one common location.

Before going and creating the app and wasting my most valuable time i did some research. This did not turn out very promising as there was about 1 site(www.pricecheck.co.za) that was able to do what i wanted very basically ,but they did not cover games well and almost not at all at times.Also i needed a location that covered local distributors.

So after finding nothing at all i decided to start with the app and see how far i could go. Well as of now as i write this post i have managed to scrape 3 sites successfully ,kalahari and take 2 for new games and zaps for used games. I have tried to get data from BT Games Site but have been unsuccessful so far.

While there is still a lot to do i now have to power to compare results from 3 different sites at one location.When game hunting this is absolutely useful.

Also the only results that i return are xbox 360 games its not that much different if i needed to integrate other platforms.

If you have any idea please let me know and i will integrate them as i get the time.