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FAQs
1. How are deals added to the app?
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Deals on the main screen are the app will always mirror the current front page deals of passwird.com. The owner of passwird.com, Irwin C., has graciously allowed me to "scrape" his site into a mobile-friendly data format that is then used to power the app.
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The same goes for search within the app. Search in the app utilizes the search feature on passwird.com and will behave in the same way that it does there.
2. Sometimes deals aren't valid anymore but the "expired" flag isn't visible. Why?
- Deals on passwird.com don't always get marked for expiration after they are no longer valid. The app will always mirror the behavior of a deal from the website.
3. Sometimes when I load the app I see a deal at the top that I haven't received a push notification for yet. Why?
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The push notification isn't a 100% realtime service. This is partially due to the nature of how deals are fed into the app and not having on-demand access to know exactly when a deal has been added to passwird.com. In essence, my server polls passwird.com at intervals to check for a new deal and then sends out the appropriate push notifications.
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The other slowness comes from the relatively cheap virtual private hosting (VPS), that I have powering the push notification service, not being a very powerful box. It tends to take a few minutes to send 1000+ push notifications out when a new deal is posted.
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One nice thing is that I made the push service multi-threaded, so that if a new deal is posted and the service is in the middle of sending notifications, it can start up another thread to send another round of notifications for a newly detected deal.
4. Do you have any other features planned for the app?
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No, not really. This was mainly a learning experience for myself that turned out to be a fun little project. I have added pretty much all of the features at this point. It is nice to see it get relatively popular and keep a steady amount of downloads per day.
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I'd love to make an Android version if/when I get the time.