200,000 Icons in the Icon Rainbow
In the initial launch of Icon Rainbow, an icon color analyzer, we featured a small subset of 5,000 icons from the Apple iTunes store. But Crystal and I knew that Icon Rainbow couldn’t be considered a fully developed project until we had the icons for all of the iPhone apps in the iTunes app store. Well, it’s official - the Icon Rainbow now features the icons for all 200,000 apps in the iTunes app store. And I guess that means you could call it a fully developed project now.
I re-wrote the scripts that scraped, analyzed and saved all of the icons from apple.com, and ran those over the course of 4 weeks on our poor little $20 Slicehost server, which is still whimpering from its taskload. Now that everything has been analyzed and saved, the icons have been migrated to Amazon S3 and an aggressive caching scheme has been put in place - the new Icon Rainbow dataset is ready for your perusing.
What’s next? First, we’re planning to open source the code. Next, we want to find ways that we can highlight the top applications from the app store, as well as the interesting colors that icons appear in the icons (my, designers sure do love their browns and periwinkles). And eventually, we’d like to be able to highlight color trends that we notice in the app store. We know we won’t be able to pull off color trending on our sad Slicehost server, so we’ll be looking into ways to efficiently analyze all of the data we’ll be collecting.
