We released our most substantial app update of 2023! This one addresses a number of bugs that we discovered after adding Sentry crash reporting. It also includes new features and some significant design revisions. Let’s get to it!

July 2023 Edit: The following bot does not currently work due to Twitter’s deprecation of the v1.1 API. The gems used in this script do not support v2, and most developers of tools for interacting with Twitter’s API seemed to have moved on. Pinball Map does not have plans to try and get our Twitter bots working again.

Summary: After a few months of experimenting with different Pinball Map hosting solutions, we have settled on Dokku for deployments, and DigitalOcean for the web server and database. The site seems quite a bit faster, the cost is the same, and we are happy with the move.

As an open source project, the Pinball Map code is on Github. Until now, though, the repositories for each component (website, blog, app) have always resided on various personal Github accounts. This might be confusing to people who want to contribute (e.g., they don’t seem “official”, or they’re hard to find). So, now we’ve created a Github “organization” named Pinball Map and put all the repos on it. The inactive repos - old blog, old Android app, old iOS app - are marked as “Archived” and will no longer accept contributions.

We are excited to share that Pinball Map has won the 2021 Annual TWIPY Award for Best Pinball App!