I had an idea a week or two ago and it received a fairly positive response on Twitter, so I thought I’d post it here and invite feedback.
You might be familiar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind it is that you sign up, and during the month of November you write a 50,000-word novel. The aim, of course, is to get those who want to write a novel to just get started, and to provide motivation via an artificial deadline. It seemingly works pretty well, and many such works of fiction are produced each year.
It occurred to me that we could do a similar thing for iPhone applications. I think that a month is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to create a cool iPhone app, and it could be a pretty interesting community event.
I don’t have many firm details in mind, but my feeling is that we’d relax a lot of the rules of NaNoWriMo, such as the one about having to start from scratch (notes notwithstanding) at the beginning of the month, and also the word-count verification at the end. I think that our goal would be to each get a new iPhone app (previously begun or not) to 1.0 by the end of the month – though not necessarily onto the App Store, of course, since there are many possible delays involved there.
All participants would naturally already be registered iPhone developers, though not necessarily with development certificates yet (you can do a lot of your development purely with the Simulator). We could potentially create a relatively simple site where we could all sign up, post progress updates (with details and/or screenshots if you didn’t want to keep your app secret, which would of course be fine too), and just generally all try to push through the month together and get something ready for release.
The NDA would mean we couldn’t have technical/developer support discussions or such, but we could at least have some sort of social angle to it; maybe forums or an IRC channel or something, bearing in mind the constraints on what we could discuss.
So that’s the basic idea. Let me know your thoughts, and maybe we could set something up. It’s already the middle of August so I don’t see this happening before the start of October or so, but I’d love to hear feedback on schedules etc too.
Sounds like fun, I’d like to participate. Timing doesn’t matter too much for me.
I’d be down for doing this around the October time frame.
Why couldn’t you talk about development on a private list or forum where only NDA signatories are allowed? I’m pretty sure that would be allowed since you wouldn’t be “disclosing” anything that the other party didn’t already have access to.
Count me in!
What a great idea. I’m up for it.
I’m up for it, it will be just around the right time for me starting an iPhone app I’ve got planned.
Sounds a bit like the ironcoder projects, only for iPhone.
I’m on, I think I’ve got a great idea to work on that isn’t as difficult to get started on as my original grand plan.
As has been said, since the requirement for this thing is that everybody has signed the NDA, we should be able to discuss NDA-stuff freely internally.
Sound like a great idea … maybe even give me the motivation to start into mac dev :)
Sounds like something I’d like to get involved with – I have an idea for an iPhone app and this is just the kind of push i need to turn it into reality..
Uh yeah… Ironcoder…
Ironcoder has already had an iPhoen contest too (live at C4).
I think ypu’ll find a month is too long. Most people can’t commit to a contest of that length and you’ll find very few people taking part.
Ironcoder was more successful when it was a short weekend project.
Sounds like a great idea! Count me in.
I like the idea a lot. For someone like me who does his iPhone development on nights and weekends, a month is a good time period.
Definitely count me in, sounds like a ton of fun. This would also be a great opportunity to get a ton of handy iPhone frameworks out there to share around for common things. I’ve been contemplating making a Things-style sync framework recently… hmm.
Anyway, October sounds like a great time, a lot of devs are college students, so give ‘em a month to settle in before springing it on them. :P
Yup. count me in as a visual designer offering free services for this! :-)
I’m totally down for this and October is a grand month!
For all BYU students who are interested in something like this, a club at Brigham Young University has been working with Apple to set something like this up. More information, including rules and prizes, are available on our website:
http://cocoaheads.byu.edu/iphone
Sounds like a plan, count me in.
I had a similar idea a few months ago but got caught up with other stuff and never moved forward with it. I do own appamonth.com if you’re interested in using it. Shoot me an email to discuss.