I’ve received a few complaints about some images that showed up in the LOLCats application.
Unfortunately I have very little control over which images appear (except for the one that appears in the initial loading screen, which is my own cat, Cody). I simply search Flickr for the tags ‘LOLCAT’ or ‘LOLCATS’ and present any images it returns. Since I’m not logging into Flickr, it will always do a safe search, although that depends on the images being tagged as not safe. Perhaps requesting the results sorted by relevance or interestingness may improve the results; I’ll experiment with that for the next version.
I’ve been asked to make the OFFISHUL LOLCATS application, which will use the feed from icanhascheezburger.com and several related sites. I will continue to maintain both applications.
I have a few fixes planned for an upgrade. Most importantly, it will verify Flickr’s reachability, so it won’t simply hang if it has no network connection. Since it can take long to load images over an Edge connection, I’ve also disabled user interaction while the image is loaded, since swiping during that time can cause the image to disappear.
Checking Apple’s daily stats, it ‘sold’ almost 2400 copies in one day, including 2200 in the US, 159 in Canada, 19 in Mexico, and a few in several other countries. Since this is a free app, I’m not getting paid for it, of course. Not bad for something I just wrote for fun and as a proof of concept for testing the Flickr API 🙂