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emilbaehr / automatic-app-landing-page

A Jekyll theme for automatically generating and deploying landing page sites for mobile apps.
https://emilbaehr.github.io/automatic-app-landing-page/
MIT License
3.45k stars 1.67k forks source link

Pull screenshots from iTunes Search API #3

Open tomj opened 5 years ago

tomj commented 5 years ago

Would it be reasonable to add an option where users can have the app screenshots pulled from the iTunes Search API?

This would reduce the friction of the tool even further (it's great btw, nice work!)

PatMurrayDEV commented 5 years ago

I also think some more of the _config.yml file could be pulled from the API, and only use the manual values as overrides:

tomj commented 5 years ago

Now we're talking!

Initial thoughts from my end were cooking up a super basic Jekyll Plugin but this seems to be out as GH Pages has a whitelisted-limited-plugin-situation.

Next thought is to use a Jekyll plugin which already exists like jekyll-get but that seems to be out too.

Conclusion:

Using the Jekyll data files thingo in addition to a really basic (optional) script looks like a good first place to start.

PatMurrayDEV commented 5 years ago

I mean using Netlify or something to build and host would work better than GitHub but not everyone would want to use it. Other option is making the page more frontend heavy and JS do the fetching of that data, but that's not ideal

emilbaehr commented 5 years ago

Hi all,

Thanks for the kind feedback. There’s likely room for improvement here and there.

The theme currently fetches icon, name, price and App Store link. These can be overwritten in _config.yml.

I tried for some time to get automatic screenshots to work well, but mostly the API could only provide iPhone 6/7/8 aspect ratio screenshots. Also, a lot of apps have custom screenshots with text, which could look weird on the website. This could of course just be overwritten. I hope Apple will update the iTunes search API so it would be possible to make it full-automatic like you guys mention. Maybe I’m just not seeing where to get the right screenshots from.

Regarding automatic description, that could probably be added. On the other hand I used it mostly as a tagline rather than a comprehensive description, but there are probably a lot of different use cases for this, so it would be nice to fetch description automatically with the option to overwrite with a tagline instead.

tomj commented 5 years ago

No worries @emilbaehr - perhaps this issue could be tagged up as a "feature request" or similar so it doesn't get in the way of important issues? 😃