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Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Freeware*Palm* Ratings Extracted and Sorted

Following on the heels of similar work for the Pocket PC, here is an extraction of all the ratings from freewarepalm.com, sorted by popularity. Programs with the most ratings are at the top; programs with the least ratings, at the bottom. This gives an excellent view of which freeware programs are highly regarded in the Palm community.

Without screenshots
With screenshots (1991 of them!)

Why this work was necessary: FreewarePalm contains a goldmine of ratings of Palm freeware. But it does not provide a way to sort the programs by rating. That is why I extracted the ratings and sorted them.

Quick Facts:
  • FreewarePalm lists 6277 freeware programs
  • 1991 of those programs have at least one rating
  • There are a total of 7529 ratings entered
  • I extracted the information using Cygwin lynx, XEmacs, and a 60-line Ruby script

6 Comments:

  • Great job. I would rather refer to your list than have to plow thru the 000s of lists in freeware palm. I just recently upgraded to a tungsten 3 and will use this list to pick up some cool apps. Thanks.

    Starad

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12/23/2004 2:33 p.m.  

  • Starad - My pleasure! Enjoy!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 12/23/2004 2:37 p.m.  

  • Thanks for taking the time to do this--it makes browsing the listings so much less time consuming and more fulfilling. I was actually considering doing the same as you. I'm glad that I found this before I took the time to do so!

    But... Does it have to be in a single page? It would render much faster if it were spread across multiple ones.

    By Blogger Ben Oakes, at 1/04/2005 11:03 a.m.  

  • Hi Ben - You're welcome! Interesting idea about multiple pages ...

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/04/2005 11:10 a.m.  

  • Linked to this page on my blog, teguy.blogspot.com

    Awesome work, multiple pages, even a way to select how many to display would help slower connectiosn, but otherwise, fantastic idea, and something freewarepalm.com should have done long ago.

    By Blogger Chris, at 9/30/2005 1:44 p.m.  

  • Hi Chris - Glad you found it useful!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 9/30/2005 10:23 p.m.  

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