MajicRank is designed to give iPhone and Mac app Developers an easy way to see how popular their applications are around the world.

About / Support

It is likely that at some point Apple will change their formats and the scrapping algorithms will fail. So it's also likely that at some point this app will crash or give false results or have some other problem. However I will try to keep it working, and please let me know of any bugs you find. The Majic Jungle support burden is rather large these days, so please do not be offended if you do not get a response, but know that I'm reading every email and will try to do my best to fix any major issues.

I'm @majicDave on twitter, or you can email me: developer@majicjungle.com

MajicRank is freeware.

New in 1.8

• Adds support for Mac App Store Ranks

Version Notes:

The Mac App Store is quite different in a number of ways, so this release may still contain bugs. You may wish to back up your data from ~/Library/Application Support/MajicRank before adding any Mac apps.

Simply select 'Mac' from the list of device options to add a Mac app. It is possible that when you enter an app name it will have found an app with the same name on the iPhone App Store and automatically taken that id. If so, you can simply delete the id after selecting the 'Mac' device. It will then attempt to fetch it from the Mac App Store data.

MajicRank in its current state does not comply with the Mac App Store review guidelines, so will not be submitted. I will continue to look at options for getting it into the store, but for now this does not appear feasible.

Usage

Press the '+' button to add your app, edit the name by double clicking on it. The name must match exactly the name that is currently listed in the App Store for MajicRank to automatically find the App ID. Alternatively you can enter any name you like and enter the iTunes App ID. Select the categories that your app belongs to.

Every time you refresh or restart the app, MajicRank will attempt to download every category that is selected from every selected region. Sometimes a download may fail, and a yellow exclamation mark represents this.

If your app does not rank in the top 200 in any selected categories for a given region, that region will not be displayed. So apps that do not rank anywhere will show no results at all.

The more categories you add, the slower the load time will be. 10 apps all set to Games/Action should be as quick to load as 1 app set to Games/Action, but 10 apps each with uniquely different categories will be 10x slower to load than 1 app. Be aware that MajicRank can use a lot of bandwidth. It downloads a large number of xml files, especially if you're downloading for all regions.

Every time you make a change to the apps list or an app's categories the changes are saved automatically and will load on relaunch of the app. If you come across a crash on launch, or want to get rid of your saved configurations for any reason, remove ~/Library/Application Support/MajicRank/appsModel.plist

By default MajicRank will only download the 'Big Eight', the eight largest (arbitrarily decided by me) regions. This can be changed in the preferences, but be aware of the longer load time, and larger archive files.

To use the Top Grossing feature, or for a universal app add another copy of your app and change the chart type to Top Grossing, or device to iPad or Mac. You can rename the app in the list to indicate that it's different, as all data is stored by App ID, not the name.

To schedule downloads, go to the MajicRank preferences and check the Schedule check box, and select how often you want to refresh. While the app is open it will automatically refresh on schedule. To export an app's data, select File->Export... and chose a base filename. It will export 1 file per category, for all times and regions that have been archived for the selected app. Some odd files may appear, they will be due to an occasional bad result slipping through in historical data.

Graphs / Archiving

Without archiving any data, you will never see any graphs. By default, MajicRank 1.2 did not archive data, however the current version should archive data by default. Have a look at the 'Archive Results' checkbox in the preferences to change this option.

Currently, the archives can potentially be very large. If you have all available regions set in the preferences, and many categories set for your apps, the data saved each time you refresh could measure in the MB. I plan to allow archiving of only the apps you have in your list in the future, but in the mean time, be aware of the potential for the files: '~/Library/Application Support/MajicRank/results_*.mjres' to fill up your disk space.

You can turn off archiving (and thus any useful graph results) in the preferences menu by un-checking 'Archive Results'.