Release

[Adam Feinstein]

A'ight folks, the hour is almost upon us. Everything came together on time, which is amazing. You guys rock! The final piece of the puzzle is a French translation of the "what's new" string, and once that's done, I'll publish 2.1. Woo hoo!

[Jonathan Bettger]

On time? Aren't we a day early? But woohoo.

On Jun 14, 2013 5:21 PM, "Adam Feinstein" <gelak...@gmail.com> wrote:

A'ight folks, the hour is almost upon us. Everything came together on time, which is amazing. You guys rock! The final piece of the puzzle is a French translation of the "what's new" string, and once that's done, I'll publish 2.1. Woo hoo!

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[Ghislain Nebra]

French translation of the "what's new" section done. Release ready to launch.

[Adam Feinstein]

Published! Now let's see what weird crash reports we get...

[Jonathan Bettger]

They are weird, but it looks like there isn't anything too crazy or out of hand.

Did you ever make a reddit post for it?

[Adam Feinstein]

I did not. You can go for it. If there will be a 2.1.1, some small fixes will include adding Judge's Corner to list of default fragments and adding a landscape layout for the deck counter tab.

[Jonathan Bettger]

http://www.mtgfamiliar.com/ Writing up the post I ran into that. It looks like that lapsed.

[Jonathan Bettger]

And posted http://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1git5f/mtg_familiar_21_is_released/

[Adam Feinstein]

Yeah, I told April to let it lapse. There was nothing there, and the Play Store external URL goes to the google code splash page. I have no desire to code up a webpage, but if someone wants to put together a page, I'll throw some of the donations money towards registration.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Oh I just found it in the app description.

[Adam Feinstein]

Whoops. Fixed. Interestingly, the French translation had the correct google code URL while the English one did not.

[Michael Shick]

The downvote brigade is coming down pretty hard on the reddit announcement.  Weird.

[Jonathan Bettger]

And here I thought I made it as neutral and informative as possible. Guess I should have include a "This is a text post, so no karma will be given to me."

[Adam Feinstein]

8 up / 5 down doesn't seem that rough. Early afternoon posting are kind of a no-mans land anyway.

[Jonathan Bettger]

I would think its one of the best. Pacific is rolling into work, Eastern is rolling back from lunch. Then again, I only have comment karma not link karma, So i know nothing.

[Jonathan Bettger]

So Ætherling.... yeah, something went wrong somewhere. Search Blue and Dragon's Maze, Aethering comes up with some weird symbols.

[Adam Feinstein]

Not cool, Aetherling, not cool. I'll look into where the parser barfed.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Jeez, I'm kinda split between "Are you not appeased?" and "You know its really cool that people actually joke about expecting the app to have the kitchen sink."

In other news, its come up a few times in the thread, and I was already thinking about it. Can you ask TCG Player if it would be ok to store card price information ourselves? Basically the plan would be daily/weekly to cron-job update the price information list and store it somewhere (Also a point of needs to be solved). In the options menu you could hit a "Download Price Information for Offline mode" menu item. This would grab the latest information and store it for X days/hours. Mostly a feature for spotty internet connections when at an event. I would even be willing to say the information should only extend back to Standard or Extended cards only.

[Adam Feinstein]

We already have a caching system in place for prices, you know. All we would have to do is set the cache to ignore prices > 1 week instead of > 24 hrs, and then write a service to fetch for all cards in a set or whatever.

[April King]

That sort of thing would make me very angry.  I do a lot of trading and many cards have very significant jumps or drops in a single day.  If my app missed that because it had cached a price from a week ago, I would be distinctly unhappy.

[Adam Feinstein]

And that's why it would be an optional feature, and you don't have to trust anyone else's device.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Basically I was just thinking in being fair to TCG Player, allowing users to hit 1619 (number of cards in standard) requests at once  wouldn't be fair to them. By setting up a server with the data already mashed together it would reduce the calls to 1619 from us, then we handle all the user's calls. I was thinking this really should only be for an offline mode of price information for time phone service doesn't fully work like large events or LGS with no/spotty service.

The weekly thing was only in thought to do it on a Thursday night, so people can grab the prices Friday and have the list for long Magic weekends. Daily is also fine. I wouldn't be something I want to push on users, thats why they can only go to an option and say grab prices for offline mode.

[April King]

Fine if it's optional, but I still don't think it's something that's too highly desired.  And somebody here needs to make sure that the process doesn't stop running for whatever reason, or else people might find themselves with month old+ data at some point.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Oh, I wouldn't let the data go for longer then its time period. I wouldn't want people to say hey look at this pricing *cough that happens to be prerelease pricing cough*. The price wouldn't pull if the data is older then the set time period. 

I've had 2 or 3 people ask on the reddit thread so far. And I've wanted it for myself for awhile now. Mostly because I use my old Galaxy S1 phone during large events (PTQ, SCG) which doesn't have a SIM card in it anymore, and if I can't connect to the buildings wifi I have to pull my normal phone out just to do trading.

[Adam Feinstein]

They wouldn't end up with month old+ data. It would see the cache is old, toss it, and try to download it again.

It would be nice to inquire with TCGPlayer, but I get the feeling that they aren't going out of their way to beef up their API...

[Jonathan Bettger]

Adam's suggestion is the best for not having to maintain the list locally ourselves. Its just is it fair to our price provider to allow that made calls from X users? If its not worth maintaining the list or allowing that many calls, I'm fine with that.  

[Adam Feinstein]

Go ahead and ask ch...@tcgplayer.com, it never hurt. I would think that their server can handle it, and I dont think many users would use it. Maybe 10%?

[Jonathan Bettger]

I would ask if they could just build a page that merges all price information for a set. But seeing how long it took just to get x3 I wouldn't want to depend on that too much.

Their server's might be beefy enough, its not like the calls are that large its just a lot. From a business standpoint I've always taken the API as a way for TCG Player to get referrals to sell cards. Grabbing this much information that would primarily be used for trading wouldn't increase their referrals, hence maybe not fair.

Other then making things better (optimizing Life Counter layouts for tablets is the big one i want to tackle) or deck/inventory list (which is a whole other discussion) I'm more or less out of features to add.

[Jonathan Bettger]

True, never hurts to ask. Though forgiveness before permission is popping up in my head.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Yep, Chedy wouldn't mind a server doing the grabbing but not the users doing it. The API was only designed for "1 on 1 card lookups". 

With that in mind can Google Sites support any kind of cron job? I have my own hosting plan that I can use to grab/build the data then dump the file to the Google Site. (Python or bash script that we can include and update in the source). Then is there a way pre-populate all the robospice calls after hitting the button.

[Adam Feinstein]

I dont think google sites support much of anything besides hosting static sites. What do I know though, I've only used it for static sites.

[Jonathan Bettger]

Does it allow ftp/ssh access?

[Adam Feinstein]

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sites/ftp/sites/lK27RwLg7D4/cbBmoPKS3MEJ

[Jonathan Bettger]

Doh, I guess I could have looked for myself. Sorry. :P

Man, Google is weird sometimes. Can't upload to Sites, but can API upload to Drive. I'll mess with it over the next few days to see if something reasonable can be made.

[Adam Feinstein]

Can we get a direct URL to a file on drive? If so, we can just throw it on mtg.familiar's drive

[Jonathan Bettger]

Yes? https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B9ZLkXSpy5vLc1hybXRXZDhnOUE is a link to the json file for AVR. And if I'm reading everything right, Python(/langauge of choice) can access and edit the file.

[Adam Feinstein]

Good grief that is an ugly URL

[Jonathan Bettger]

Ok google you just be crazy, they have API access to Google Sites. https://developers.google.com/google-apps/sites/docs/1.0/developers_guide_python

[Adam Feinstein]

Unrelated to conversation, new humble android bundle means incoming games tonight!