For the last six months I've been working on a pet project with my designer friend Arne. We call it iusethis, and it's a website for keeping track of the apps you use. It's for the mac for now, and it's based on Catalyst and DBIx::Class. Like any modern web app, it's got rss feeds, and a social network. The intention behind iusethis was to make a site where it was easier to find the good apps. We believe that the best people to advice you on what apps to use, are your friends. You can track what apps your friends are adopting through subscribing to new apps they adopt, and recommendations from app neighbours. We don't believe in browsing through 10 sucky apps to find the good one. We believe in our friends and fellow users, and that our approach is a lot smarter.

We've used the opportunity to play with lots of ajax goodness to make the user experience smoother. We don't believe star rating is efficient, so we use more binary values. Mostly it's stuff like incrementing use count without page reload, system messages and setting switches.

We also want you to effortlessly find the app you are looking  for. To that end, we made categorization based on tags, and we also feature a full-powered free text search engine based on the Xapian engine.

Registration and use is free, and anyone can register applications, upload icons and screenshots, and register versions for their app. We also feature a system for claiming apps, so that app authors can maintain their own apps, if they wish. We also have a comment system with avatar support, and offer trackback linking to your blog for reviews and other articles related to apps. Right now, we are running in public beta, but are planning to remove that label as soon as everything checks out ok.

We also have some plans for new features for this system, for instance, we want to add support for version checking your apps, so that you can be notified of updates only for apps you use. There is also a tool for extracting and uploading icons in the works. We'd also like to expose a public API, if we can figure out what people want.

Feel free to try it out at http://osx.iusethis.com/ and give us feedback. We'd love to hear from you :)

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With regards
Marcus # http://osx.iusethis.com/user/marcus
& Arne #  http://osx.iusethis.com/user/arne
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