Fixing appdailysales.py

As an iPhone app developer, I like to keep track of how my apps are doing on a daily basis. They’re not huge sellers or anything (usually like a couple dozen or so total sales per day) but I am curious. On Friday morning, I noticed that Apple slightly modified their iTunes site in such a way that appdailysales.py (the python script that I was using to grab my daily stats) stopped working.

I checked for updates but didn’t see any. So I spent some time trying to see if I could fix it myself. I don’t know python that well and I know almost nothing about web protocols or forms or what not but after some searching, I found a script that mostly worked from a couple web pages on that topic. So after several hours on Saturday of experimenting, modifying, and coding I finally got it to work again! I also threw in a modification to be able to type your password on the command line invisibly.

And then I found out that the original author had submitted an update to resolve the main issue just a few minutes after I first checked.

Ah well, it was still an educational experience and now I know python a bit better. Also, this supports my theory that if you ignore a problem long enough, it eventually goes away. In any case, if anyone’s interested in my version, it’s here.