This is annoying. The guy adds new stuff instead of fixing broken stuff. Makes me want to write my own MAL…
– FSX
This is something I didn’t realized when I woke up and after watching some anime, my MyAnimeList client broke for some reason… Well of course!
Earlier today, MyAnimeList, one of the popular Anime/Manga cataloging website looked different. I thought that this was a dream, but it wasn’t. I don’t care much about the new design, but I perfer the old design. This is bringing back memories of Facebook forcing it’s users to use the new layout, but the difference is that Facebook is more open to the developers… MAL on the other hand… well, it broke every MAL client out there since people are using it instead of the website, meaning less revenue from ads.
What the hell they are smoking? This is the main reason I actually HATE MAL… because they are not freaking open to the developers! WHY THE HELL UPDATE THE FREAKING LAYOUT WHEN YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE A FULLY IMPLEMENTED API FOR GOD SAKE! This is making developers life’s like myself even harder. Not to mention, the freaking API is so hard to use that it’s not even funny.
Suggestion, stop using MyAnimeList and go for the alternatives like AniDB or even Melative, which does Manga, Anime and even other media such as light/visual novels, dramas, etc. While I’m at it, I’m making a desktop client for it to make it even easier, so when I’m finished, there is no need to ever use MyAnimeList. Until whoever makes MyAnimeList cleans up their act and actually make a USABLE API for developers to use, they owe me 8 strawberry sundaes.
And yes, it’s an extension to the other rant I made about MAL and it’s APIs.
I don’t understand the design move (that is a huge banner O.o), but I understand it would probably break scraping api/clients. Open API is da goods.
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http://www.anime-planet.com/ is a great alternative to MAL. It’s better and easier to use IMO.
Don’t think Anime Planet has any APIs or desktop clients, so it wouldn’t really help much.
How’d the new layout break the clients? Why aren’t you using /login.php or the API to authenticate? What’s difficult about the API in terms of authentication (I know of the other ‘easy of use’ things regarding the API) Explain.
@Xinil
I may not have specified what APIs are hard to use… I apologize if I didn’t explained it fully enough. Well, here is some reasons why it’s hard to use:
1. No documentation to authorize the account. Typically, most services have a separate API to verify the user’s account. If you take a look at Twitter for example, they do not use login.php as the authorization point, but a separate API, such as http://melative.com/api/account/verify_credentials.xml used on melative with uses basic auth to login.
2. No documentation on retrieving the Anime/Manga list. You said that malappinfo.php was going to be replaced, as I presume but never was. If not, why no documentation on it? Also, this seems to be the only way to retrieve the episode watched/status/etc information.
3. XML Data for updating Anime/Manga status isn’t developer friendly. Although sending XML data is RESTFul, it’s no means user friendly for a client standpoint. XML Data is meant to be used for server applications like web applications written in PHP/Ruby/Python/etc and not for desktop applications. The updating APIs needs to support form data to submit data, which the majority of APIs use. No developer should have to write out the XML, save it and submit it in order to update the information, it’s ridiculous.
4. NoJSON support. JSON stands for Java Script Object Notification which is used in Javascript and is faster to parse. All APIs I seen support it, so why not this one?
5. Broken Search API. The XML data from the Search API is completely unusable with the XML Parser because of invalid XML.
This is the main complaints I have with the API… it’s just not as user friendly as other APIs I seen mainly because of the lack of documentation and also the update functions not being user friendly.
Apparently I forgot to add in ‘verify_credentials’ to the FAQ. Try it out here: http://myanimelist.net/modules.php?go=api#account-verifycred
The API is definitely in need of some precious updating time. I’ll see about getting those other issues looked at too.
3. “save it and submit it”
Why would you need to save it?
5. Make your own parser 😉
The API indeed is lacking, but you can still do a lot parsing some html if you have the login cookie first.
Thanks for the alternate links. New MAL makes me want to get out the flamethrowers.