Introducing App Store Apex: an awesome visualization of what’s hot on Apple’s App Store!

Aren’t you bored of the old fashionned iTunes ranking? So were we! That’s why we built App Store Apex, a free HTML visualization of the App Store ranking.

It creates a slideshow of the 10 most popular apps on the App Store, and uses the following ones as a background. It’s an enjoyable way to keep an eye on what’s trending on the App Store!

How can I use it?

It’s a very versatile tool. Since it’s a web page, you can use it on your laptop, on your phone, and even make a screensaver out of it since it auto-refreshes every 15 minutes.

It comes with a handy feature: you can pick whichever ranking you’d like. It defaults to the ranking of free apps on the US App Store, but you can easily switch to any other. Just browse to Apple’s RSS generator, pick the feed you’re interested in, then append the URL to http://apex.applidium.com as a “feed” parameter (you’ll have to URL-escape any = sign as %3D).

Here are a few examples:

• The ranking of free apps on the French App Store
• The best iPad games on the Spanish App Store
• The top paid business apps in the US

Why HTML?

Internally we’re displaying this on a flatscreen TV. Using HTML means we can hook up pretty much any hardware to the TV and be pretty confident that it’ll be able to display our visualization.

It’s also been an interesting experiment: even though the performances are good most of the time, the “refresh” action is a bit laggy. Fortunately it only happens once every 15 minutes, but we reached HTML’s limits: no matter how hard we could try, there’s no way to make that reload smooth because JavaScript doesn’t expose any concurrency primitive.

While we’re on the topic of performances, it should be noted that while they’re pretty good on the desktop, we aren’t quite there on mobile yet. Indeed, the animation is kinda smooth on an iPhone 5 (~25fps), but is terribly slow even on the not so old iPad 2.

What’s more?

Last but not least, App Store Apex is open source! We’re eagerly waiting for your pull requests on its GitHub page.