The positive release of Voyer has brought to mind my Pinterest app which I developed for Windows UWP (Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile) called “Pinnie”.
Pinnie was advanced in development, having abilities to browse your boards, upload pins, view pins, etc. In fact, it was not only created first, but Voyer was built from an early fork of it!
The only reason Pinnie never went public to listing in the store, was I felt a little disappointed in the API abilities published by Pinterest and I was not sure about if it would be valuable in the store.
You see, regardless of what the Pinterest web site and Pinterest’s own apps can do in the Google Play and Apple stores, their public interfaces available to the rest of us are somewhat limited.
For instance, you cannot search for pins, or even other users. That’s a fairly important part of social networks to leave out!
The final straw to me was that Private/Hidden boards were not accessible at all. Not even your own!
I should mention that I did contact Pinterest about this and they were wonderful. This is not a criticism of them in any way. It is purely a value call on weather what’s available allows us to deliver a compelling user experience.
Luckily, Windows Phone (not UWP or Windows 10 desktop) already has a very capable Pinterest app. The developer of that app must have put some serious time into working around this limitation in the public API which I was not 100% sure I was prepared to re-invent when Pinterest themselves were purposefully choosing to prevent it. (Private boards are indicated in the API, you just can’t get them)
However given the positive response to the read-only Voyer app, maybe I was too harsh on the value of Pinnie. Bringing a Pinterest tool to Windows 10, Continuum and Xbox One might still be helpful to people.
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