So after a very tense final round, we’ve had a chance to catch our breath and we now have the 1st stage of the development teams in place.
Drum roll…
Will the App Smoke When Your Food’s Burning?
3rd place finalist Michael Yuan is teaming up with Austin Sarner, developer of AppZapper and the much hyped Disco, to create Cookbook.
This is great match because in addition to being one of the apps Austin really wants to do, it also fits into his skill set very nicely. It’ll be driven by Core Data and Austin has already worked on several apps that incorporate it.
And with his attention to detail and love of doing just things for their coolness factor, I’m positive that Cookbook is going to be a fantastic, sleek app.
Think Sync
2nd place finalist Farzad Sadjadi and award-winning SubEthaEdit developer Martin Ott are joining forces to create Portal.
This was almost perfect because Portal originally was Martin’s #2 choice to work on (only behind round 2 eliminee Chatboard). With Martin’s previous experience working with network-based apps, this should be a great fit.
Let’s Put a V-8 in a Leaf-blower
And for 1st place finalist Cameron Westland and and his app Atmosphere, we have ShapeShifter developer Jason Harris.
Yeah, this seems like a bit of overkill given Jason’s talents but think of how great this has the potential to be. Atmosphere is one of the least technically-challenging apps that were in the contest…but this means that we have the chance to make it truly dazzling since we’ll have all the “extra” time to put into it. OK, you got us…we just paired them up because of the sunglasses.
Jason and I already talked today about a game plan for it and the goal is to make your heads explode from all the eye-candy.
Where We Go Next…
I’ll be managing development of the three apps. This is something I’ve done in the past in stodgy, corporate environments so it’ll be a big change to do it here and on much cooler apps. The one significant way this’ll differ for me is that I won’t be doing much coding here. It’ll be a handful to manage all three apps so I’ll be leaving the big boyz to do their thing. My focus will be one main thing…help guide the teams to make the best apps we possibly can.
We still have yet to announce which artists will be working on each development team. This info will be coming soon.
Cookbook will pretty much be done by one designer but Atmosphere and Portal will likely have multiple designers on them because of their “themeing” aspects. (Does anyone smell upcoming theme contests??)
As far as giving timeframe estimates for the apps, to put it simply, we’re not. Some or all of the apps may use Leopard-only technologies so the very earliest you’d expect to see them would be when Leopard’s released.
One great thing about My Dream App is the openness of the process. The community that built around/throughout this all has been vital so far and we’re encouraging you all to stick around to be a part of the development process. We hope the forums will stay alive and that you’ll all provide input so that we can make extrodinary apps.
Thanks again to all of you for making My Dream App a huge success. I can hardly wait for the real fun to happen in this next stage!
