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by g_lined 5609 days ago
I like this site. I think the idea is good. One of the main ways I get good recommendations is by asking friends about their top 3 apps. I've submitted my applist. Here are the suggestions I would make:

  * Use geolocation to guess at whether to show German or English.
  * Bring out the App Store selection from the preferences to the main window
      in the OS X program. Link this in to the in-website selection of German
      and English language (it's a good guess about which App Store they use).
      This way you don't need to do the next bullet point.
  * Don't rely on people seeing your .txt and .jpg in your zip file; I didn't.
      Distribute your program as a .dmg disk image so that you can have an
      image on the background of your window to tell people to change the
      preferences.
  * Might be good to have a Deutsch/English link on the applist web page.
  * Consider using the App icons in the selection list on OS X. The name
     shown on the iPhone is not always the same name as the official App
     name so identification can be difficult in the list.
Expanded scope:

  * Consider a small set of categories - just 3 perhaps - along the lines 
     of 'useful' 'essential' and 'fun'.
  * Although the core idea is good and I enjoy it, the website for me is 
     not very useful. I could stop writing at this point but thought I'd 
     say that in an ideal world I'd like to you to 'allow me to see applists
     of people who would be my friend if only I knew them'.
Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the site.
2 comments

As native-english speaker who lived in Germany for a while I would strongly suggest NOT to use geolocation to pick the default language. Use the browser Accept-Language setting to pick the default - this is what it's for and most browsers send it. I can see from the headers on your site that you are using PHP, so here's a link to some PHP code that will parse the browser headers (and correctly interpret their weighting also):

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/use-accept-language-he...

You can use this as a starting point to redirect to the appropriate language when none has been explicitly chosen. It's a small touch, but small touches all add up to a nicer experience.

Please DON'T use geolocation to guess the language. Use accept-language.

Except for people living in Germany who prefer English there are plenty of people living close to Germany who may receive the german version of the site as well.