Yeyy!! My first Pokki is published!

I already wrote about what is Pokki how useful it could be. I spent some time thinking, what Pokki can I built that will be useful in my everyday work. I often find myself searching for online tools that do some simple dev related tasks and I thought that it will be great idea to bundle all kind of such tools into one Pokki that stays on my taskbar and is always just a click away from me.

What’s included in the first version

For the first version and included three tools:

• Regex tool – very simple regex form that checks for a match or eventually replaces a string into string. This one can be widely extended with all kind of operations, quick options, etc.
• HTML encoder tool – as vtrifonov wrote about in his post, bloggers often needs a tool that escapes html characters. This one encodes and decodes html string.
• Color converter tool – converter between RGB and Hex format. Again this tool can be greatly extended – adding pallets, color picker, etc.

 The review process was quite straight forward. You first need to submit your app - there is an automated check if the package is ok and you need to fill some information that is used in the app store. After a day I got an email that there some issues with the package - the icon was not in a good shape and also some resizing issues. After submiting again - everything was ok and after another day the Pokki was published and downloadable through the store. I also added one update that followed the same workflow and everything went smoothly.

The results

One of the good things about Pokki is that they give you out of the box analytics about the usage of your app. During the first two weeks, my first app has 542 active users. I was really surprised by this and this is really inspiring for me to continue to develop this Pokki further.

Next steps …

I have already planned some features for the next versions. Since, my audience is mainly developers, I think it will be good idea to give my users the chance to create their own tools into my Pokki. This will be great showcase for using the local storage of Pokki’s framework and Kendo’s tabstrip. I will also give you the chance to send your tool to me, so I can consider adding it to the product.
Some other plans that I have are for – personalization, adding more features and extending the current ones. As you might have noticed, I’m really not a good UI person and will need some front end and design help. If you want to get involved – drop a comment or check out the git repository: WebDevTools.
You can download and install this Pokki by following this link (works even if you don’t have the framework already): Download Web Development Tools Pokki All suggestions and thoughts are more than welcome so feel free to abuse the comment form :)