Apple's free iTunes API offers App Store search and app metadata without a key

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A developer guide explains how to search App Store apps and retrieve metadata using Apple's free iTunes Search API, which requires no account or API key. Search results are returned in rank order and include details such as app name, ratings, rating count, price and version. A lookup endpoint can fetch metadata for one or several app IDs in a single call. Ratings and rankings vary by storefront, so changing the country parameter allows market comparisons. The guide also notes Apple's rate limits and the need to space out requests, and the author discloses that they sell a paid, per-result Apify Actor that packages these queries.

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DraftMark uses a model to write ship survey code, checked against a printed booklet

A developer built DraftMark for the Meta AI Developer Hackathon to time-average a ship's moving waterline from video and have a model generate per-ship draft survey programs. Rather than trusting the model's output, the author tested the generated program against 22 worked loading conditions printed in a Ro-Ro ship's stability booklet, requiring agreement within 0.1 percent. A verbatim implementation of the booklet's procedure matched only 14 of 22 rows, because it omitted a second trim correction and contained unstated conventions. After two regenerations with feedback on failing rows, the model's program reproduced all 22 conditions. The finished survey was also checked on one in-sample row, landing about 0.01 percent from the printed value.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Adversarial test pairs reveal when agent caches serve wrong write actions

Hit-rate benchmarks show how often an agent cache helps but not when it causes harm, and replaying the wrong write step, such as deactivating instead of activating, can outweigh any token savings. The author proposes an adversarial eval built from near-opposite command pairs that share wording and structure but differ in one consequential verb. Embedding similarity tracks topic rather than polarity, so a threshold-only cache scored 1 of 18 false positives on this set, while a gated engine that replays write-containing trajectories only on exact repeats scored 0. The author recommends running such an eval as a CI gate so that threshold or model changes cannot silently reintroduce the failure. The method is presented as portable to other domains, though the 18-pair set itself is only a template and says little about any particular traffic.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Haunted AI: Whispers of Blackthorn Manor, a Local Qwen-Powered Detective Game

Haunted AI: Whispers of Blackthorn Manor is a supernatural detective browser game in which a 1926 death draws the player into a mansion a century later. Three ghosts, Eleanor, Thomas and Clara, each recall different parts of the night, so the player must gather evidence across six rooms, collect eight clues, reconstruct a torn letter and connect findings on a detective board. The game ends with a submitted theory and one of three endings: Truth Revealed, Partial Truth or False Accusation. Its AI gives each ghost a limited, consistent perspective, with dialogue generated by the locally run open-weight qwen2.5:1.5b model through Ollama while the backend enforces game rules. The project was built as a submission to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge and is published as open source under the MIT license.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Handling Email API 429 Rate Limits in Logistics: Who Owns the Template?

The article argues that a 429 response from an email API should be treated as a queuing decision rather than a failed send. It recommends durable verification events, honoring the provider's Retry-After header, and retrying with bounded jitter and a defined deadline. A central point is that retry logic controls timing while template ownership controls content, and mixing the two can cause stale or inconsistent emails. For logistics signup verification, the author favors keeping templates in the application repository, since pinning a versioned render keeps retries reproducible, though provider-managed templates suit teams needing faster copy changes.

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