The past weeks have been a blur of amazing scenery going by at way too quick of pace (and with way too little bandwidth). It seems every time this part of the year is like this as we transition to be on the west coast for Burning Man. Before leaving Saint Louis, we found out about iOSDevCamp 2010 being held in San Jose, CA and made that our target. We didn’t know too much about event, other than it was for iPhone app developers, was volunteer run and we had met one of the organizers before.
As we meandered across country, we learned more – such as, the event was centered around a Hackerthon, an opportunity to team up and build or complete an app during the conference that would be judged. In the weeks coming into the conference, we were inspired by an idea, and completely developed a working model of a new app at iOSDevCamp. Much to our amazement, we won the ‘Most Useful App’ award!!
This is a story is how setting deadlines can work in your favor. And to better tell the story, we’ll illustrate the inspiration and describe our project with pictures (this was essentially our pitch that won us the award):
(For those on RSS or e-mail – here’s a link to the YouTube video)
We like developing apps that solve needs we have, and Coverage? will be no exception. We were highly frustrated by lack of cellular bandwidth as we crossed the country, and unexpected overage messages from Sprint and AT&T infuriated us. We let that frustration form an idea. Having the ability to overlay standardized coverage maps for each provider we use will be a valuable tool for us in our travels in planning stops and routing. With a looming deadline for submissions for the Hackerthon at iOSDevCamp, we came out with a working model of our app idea in under 16 hours of beer and pizza fueled hacking.
Having a deadline kicks your butt into gear. It gets you moving. It inspires you to create great things. And 55 great things were created at iOSDevCamp.
We have more polishing work to do on Coverage? – such as creating higher resolution detailed coverage maps (not as easy as it sounds, the ones currently in the mock-up are just rough sketches). But we are excited to launch the app sometime after we get back from Burning Man.
I think we’ll give ourselves a deadline.
Brilliant idea, you guys — and congratulations on your award! I’ve been scheming about a possible driving trip through the Midwest next year, and an app like this would be just the tool I’d need to stay productive on the road. Not shocking that you guys would have thought of it…I’ll look out for the launch and snap it up. 🙂