Tuesday 16 July 2013

The Digital Museum Where Outdated Apps Can Live Forever

There's a crew of hero historians out there slurping up the Internet for posterity in case we want to see it later, but what about all the apps? Well now there's a place for them too. Parts of them, at least.
Capptivate.co was put together by Alli Dryer of Bottle Rocket Apps, and serves as the realitely new resting place for apps of old. The site doesn't index full copies of the apps, or provide any of their functionality, but instead it hosts a distinct kind of snapshot: a little five-second video that showcases each's signature look and feel.

Dryer described her little project's genesis this way to Wired UK:
Someone asked me if I was going to add the refresh function from [the old iOS Twitter app] Tweetie, where the bird hatches from the egg, and I didn't have it and I couldn't get it! These things are just going to be gone. ...I'm starting to think of it as a museum that I'm curating, which holds these apps that are going to vanish, and where we can reference them.
Of course there are a ton of challenges. There are some 900,000 in the AppStore alone, for instance and so far Capptivate hasn't ventured beyond archiving the mountain of iOS apps. And that's to say nothing of how fast apps can get updated. But the project is young-only a few months-and ideally Dryer will set up some kind of system for developers to submit their own apps for inclusion.
You might not think much of antiquated app animations, but someday we might have a reason to dig into that history, so it doesn't hurt to keep it around. You can read more about Dryer and her pet project over at Wired UK. [Wired UK via Ars Technica]

source:gizmodo.in

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