Dev diary

AutoPullRepo – a Bitbucket project

AutoPullRepo - a Bitbucket projectI’m a Bitbucket.org user and please don’t judge me for that. There are a lot of different opinions about Bitbucket vs. GitHub, but mine is the only one that matters to me since I’m extremely satisfied with the features and the use of Bitbucket. Why would I switch to any other source control service? Now that we cleared that out, let’s talk about this post’s subject. :)

 

The problem:

Actualy two of them. I have a hosting account in Slovenia, they block all foreign IP’s to connect to FTP, so It’s pain in the but to make some changes on the script there. My other problem (while working on WhoAPI); if you have let’s say 20 hosting accounts all over the world and you need to update the same script that’s on all of them, how would you do it? (no control of the server modules, so no automatic deployment)

 
The research:

I found no scripts that can solve these problems. I’m sure that they exists, but I lost two (if not more) hours trying to find a finished and a working one.

 
The solution:

I made a script (one file) that you upload to your server, change two lines of code, set the Bitbucket settings to ping the script as soon as you make the change to your files on your repository (30sec. job) and you’re done! What this script does is it download’s your script from the Bitbucket repository and extracts it, so you have the latest version of your script always live.

No FTP, no drag&dropping files or scp-ing to the server directly. Out of the box solution for easy automatic script deployment. And yes, It’s in PHP :/ I would like to write the same thing in Python, and Node.js version would be cool as well.

Check it out here: https://bitbucket.org/edifreak/autopullrepo
 

Our first iPhone app in development

Yep, after long wait we’re finally doing it. Here’s the story. We loved what we saw when iPhone was first introduced and the potential after Android showed what can be done with the apps (before the iPhone introduced the AppStore). We’ve been eager to get involved in all the hype these platforms created. So after three long years we bought a Mac Mini and started developing our first app. I must not forget to mention my brother Dino Budimilic who had the time to learn how to use the Mac, Xcode and all what comes with it :) He helped us create the app.

The app we’re making is all about our existing web service on http://crodns.com. It’s a domain availability checker with whois information on demand. We’ve already created the WebApp that works on all smartphones (at least we like to think so) which you can try here: http://m.crodns.com

Here are some screenshots of the icons we made. You may notice which icon we decided to go with on the Loading screen:

In-app screenshots and videos are coming after the release. My estimate is we’ll submit the app to the AppStore before this month ends. I don’t expect any problems with Apple’s approval :)

This version is intentionally made for regional market, that means it’s localized. But we didn’t forget the Global market, no! We’re planning to release the English version right after this one, as a separate project. We haven’t yet decided which domain to use for it, but we’re sure to find out using our first app ;)