Appstuh

We posted yesterday about the new version of Gamer Friends for PSN, version 1.1.0. That version includes many new features and a few bug fixes.

Well, version 1.1.0 should hit all of our users tomorrow morning, as Palm has approved the update for distribution.

We hope you enjoy Gamer Friends 1.1.0, as it includes direct PSN list retrieval, with the ability to refresh the data. This means you will be able to automatically pull in your PSN friend data at regular intervals, thereby allowing you to just keep your webOS handset on your desk, in your hand, or on the touchstone charger — my favorite. Then it will just refresh the list and you’ll be able to see who is online, in a game, or offline.

We hope you enjoy the app after the update. We know it is certainly better with these features than without.

Today, Appstuh submitted Gamer Friends for PSN version 1.1.0 to Palm for inclusion in the App Catalog.

The reason this version has such a large point upgrade is because we added a very large feature. We expect this update to go out to our users within a week, as Palm can take a week (sometimes more) to thoroughly review apps before allowing them to be submitted.

The changelog is as follows:

[Feature] Provide trophy description when the user taps on a specific trophy
[Feature] Show the total number of trophies earned
[Feature] Ability to log into PSN and get your friends list
[Feature] Ability to view the status of your friend (PSN friend list only)
[Feature] Allow for customization of the auto-refresh feature
[Feature] Status indicators easily show who is online, online and playing a game, or offline
[Feature] List your PSN friends based on their status and then alphabetically by PSN ID

[Bug] Users who haven’t played any games do not show up properly
[Bug] Some trophies had no names — rare, unreproducible
[Bug] Not viewing the friend list prevented the list from refreshing (i.e. if you were viewing games played or trophies earned)

Again, this update is expected to be in the catalog within a week. You can’t find these features in any other app in the Catalog!

Appstuh is currently in the testing stages of Gamer Friends for PSN version 1.1.0.

The version is in our closed beta group as 1.0.5 and will soon be available for all of our users. We hope to have this update out to our users by Tuesday July 13, 2010.

This update fixes a few bugs reported by our users:

• Nameless trophies (rare, impossible for us to reproduce)
• An error that occurs when there are no played games by the user

This update adds:

• The ability to see the total number of trophies
• The descriptions of all trophies (note, some may be blank)
• Ability to get your friends list directly from PSN (requires authentication, routes through our server)

Note that in order to get your friends list, you MUST authenticate (PSN email, PSN password). This information goes to our servers. We do NOT do ANY logging on the servers, so we do NOT know your email address or password.

We are investigating at this time whether or not we can do this on device, but at this time, we are handling this on a completely separate server dedicated to this purpose. It should handle 30+ requests per minute without slowing down, but that is untested.

Appstuh released Gamer Friends with the understanding that its users would understand that the current SDK limits the access we need to pull down the data, such as the current users’ status.

Appstuh recognizes that many users believe this functionality should be there at launch. We do not want to place blame where it isn’t due, so we want to say it is about half our fault and half Palm’s fault.

While Palm is struggling to make up for the lack of a proper SDK for 9 months, it just cannot cut it. These are very basic things we are requesting. Granted, few web browsers support them now, but webOS is a mobile environment. The only way to develop apps with the look and feel of webOS is with the Mojo SDK. Therefore, we used that. Unfortunately, we cannot do what we want within webOS the way we want to, so we must do it another way.

We are currently relying on data from a third party. That is how we get our data for Gamer Friends. We must now create a partial API for our app, one that will compliment our currently used API. The reason we need to is because our current API doesn’t allow the functionality requested by our users. That main functionality is to see if your friend is on, and if so, what game they’re playing.

We plan on rolling out this functionality in the coming weeks, rather than a potentially months-long wait for our users. It was a tough decision to leave this functionality out when we originally put Gamer Friends up for sale, but we had no option at that time.

Keep in mind, this method is potentially risky, because Sony could just change the method they use to provide data in the blink of an eye, causing the data not to show up in the app properly (would only affect status info). We will use methods to partially fail-safe against this in the PDK hybrid version of Gamer Friends that should bring full functionality as requested. We will make a file hosted by us (on the Internet) able to tell the app how to access the data. Of course, this won’t prevent some massive data storage change from Sony to wreak havoc around our app, but you can rest assured if Sony did that, we would be all over it to release a fix within days. We care about our clients and we want to provide the best possible functionality.

Remember, purchase the app now. This added functionality adds cost to app maintenance and as such, we may raise the price more than we had originally planned to on July 16 (USA customers), and on July 23rd (for our non-USA customers).

Gamer Friends, an app that lets you see the games your PS3 and PSP friends have played and the trophies they’ve earned, had a highly successful launch.
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Gamer Friends has reached a landmark version 1.0.

Gamer Friends v1.0 has been submitted to Palm and an official video of the app has been submitted to YouTube.
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