Due to a recent power outage the Raspberry Pi that pushes my Pixlet apps to my Tidbyt went down and I failed to notice that it had stopped working. I had no way of knowing that the apps on my Tidbyt were no longer being updated since the instance that was last pushed to the device continued to show up in the rotation even though the data it contained was stale.
It would be useful if apps published by API could expire automatically after a certain timeframe. This way if the app stops being updated by the remote server, the latest instance that was published, will be removed from the device automatically after a certain duration (e.g. 24 hours). This way apps containing stale data will be removed if they are no longer being updated.
Currently, it is all too easy for stale data to remain in the rotation, even when it is no longer being updated. I admit that there are rare apps that have static information and never need to be updated but most need updating periodically via a cron trigger. For these rare static apps there could be an override to prevent them expiring. The default expiry could be 24hrs but the developer could override this to a suitable duration, or to ‘never’.
It would also be helpful if any apps published from the API showed the date and time that they were published in the Tidbyt app. This way we can see at a glance when they were last updated, and quickly see how fresh the data is.