Displaying Your App Store Downloads on Panic's Status Board

About a week ago Panic introduced its newest product: Status Board. It’s a widget-based app that displays different kinds of information on your iPad or on your TV.

Since there are already quite a few custom widgets out there I thought it would be nice if you could see your App Store downloads on there. We’re using App Annie and they’re offering a public API. Tim Brückmann implemented a script that creates a data source for a widget that displays the App Store sales.

Reading the API documentation and Tim’s script it was fairly easy to adapt the script to make it display the downloads. Just access units instead of revenue and you’re good to go. I published my version on GitHub. If you like it you should thank Tim, not me.

Update

In order to get the script up and running you’ll need to enter your App Annie app ids at some point. Figuring those out was not too easy for me. I found them while clicking around in the interface and checking out the links that I opened. But it turns out there’s an easier way, as Philip mentioned today.

Just go to your terminal and ask App Annie’s API for the ids:

curl --basic --user <user>:<password> "https://api.appannie.com/v1/accounts/<id>/apps"

<user> and <password> are the credentials used for the login at appannie.com and <id> is the account id which can be found querying another API:

curl --basic --user <user>:<password> "https://api.appannie.com/v1/accounts?page_index=0"

Once you’ve got the first query filled with that three fields go ahead and run it. The return value will be a JSON string containing quite a few infos about all your apps. The value you’re looking for is the app_id. Take it from all your apps and add it to this script. This will make your apps show up in status board.

Thanks Philip for pointing that out!