Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by ricardobeat on Friday March 01, 2013 @05:05PM
(#5307243)
Is this just scraping http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ ?
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Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by anti-pattern on Friday March 01, 2013 @05:40PM
(#5307432)
I've looked at their data, but I believe I've dropped some things that they consider releases. The whole thing is kind of subjective as to what constitutes a release or not. But no, I didn't just scrape their site. I compiled my own data from a variety of different freely available sources.
Might I ask why you built your own, knowing there was an almost identical offering in place for years? For example, did your different choice of releases cause a statistically significant shift in arrival times? I imagine you've done analysis comparing your approach to theirs.
Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by anti-pattern on Friday March 01, 2013 @06:30PM
(#5307638)
I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be. They even updated the design a year or two ago and all they did was give it a coat of paint, rather than rethinking how to best visualize the data.
> I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be.
I love your approach :) it's very helpful!
That's a great reason! I agree their design sucks and yours is orders of magnitude more usable.
It's just too bad that you have to re-collect the same data. N historically up-to-date data sources for N designs is just unscalable.
Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by anti-pattern on Saturday March 02, 2013 @12:41PM
(#5310251)
Indeed. Maybe I'll post the data on GitHub or something.
That was my first exact thought as well. The macrumors guide also provides a lot more data for your viewing pleasure.
Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by tobyjsullivan on Friday March 01, 2013 @07:10PM
(#5307776)
If any scraping was involved in the production of this site, it was viciously over-engineered. These are static values that only need to be updated manually once after each Apple announcement...
Edit: And before anyone says that everything should be automated, keep in mind that scrapers will break far more often than you'll ever have to update these numbers.
Re:Expected arrival times for Apple products
by anti-pattern on Friday March 01, 2013 @07:28PM
(#5307839)
They probably meant whether or not I "took" the information from somewhere else. But yeah, actually scraping the information would have been ridiculous. It's all just in a static YAML file.