Feelin' Fine

Recently, I've founded a CocoaHeads chapter for the city of Bremen. We've had a lot of initial interest in our meetings and have managed about 15 people coming to each of the meetings. For our second meeting, I organized a small challenge for which I gave away a coupon code to receive the first three NSConference 2009 videos for free (Thanks, Scotty!). This challenge was well received and got me thinking about organizing something bigger and better, much like what Ironcoder used to be, but just for our local CocoaHeads chapter.

I've started asking around on Twitter (I'm @arepty, by the way) for software vendors to donate licenses, and with the Mac developer community being as fantastic as always, I received pledges for software licenses worth over 500 € within a couple of days. To top this off, falkemedia has thrown three one-year subscriptions of their magazine Mac Life into the mix, so the winners of the upcoming competition have quite a lot of stuff to look forward to.

The competition details (theme and API) will be announced at our meeting next Thursday, August 13th 2009. Please note that this being strictly a competition for the Bremen chapter of CocoaHeads, you will only be eligible to enter if you have participated in one of our local meetings in the past or will participate on Thursday. Participants will have about three weeks to build an app (Mac or iPhone) with the theme and API that I will choose for them. After the deadline, I will judge the apps and announce winners at the September meeting of our chapter.

You're probably interested to learn what kind of software was pledged as prizes for the competition, so here's the complete list:

RapidWeaver (5 licenses)

LittleSnapper (5 licenses)

Changes (2 licenses)

Lighthouse Keeper (1 license)

Code Collector Pro (1 license)

Versions (3 licenses)

CoverSutra (3 licenses)

Decloner (5 licenses)

Posterino (5 licenses)

Mental Case (1 license)

TimeBoxed (5 licenses)

Mac Life magazine (3 one-year subscriptions)

In my opinion, that is one fantastic line-up of prizes - especially for developers. They will be distributed as follows among the best-ranking participants:

First prize: RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper, Lighthouse Keeper, Code Collector Pro, Decloner, Posterino, Versions, TimeBoxed, CoverSutra, Changes, Mental Case, Mac Life subscription
Second prize: RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper, Decloner, Posterino, Versions, TimeBoxed, CoverSutra, Changes, Mac Life subscription
Third prize: RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper, Decloner, Posterino, Versions, TimeBoxed, CoverSutra, Mac Life subscription
Fourth and fifth prize: RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper, Decloner, Posterino, TimeBoxed

Including the Mac Life subscriptions, the amount of all the prizes comes to over 1,000 €. I'd like to thank all of the sponsors for their generous offers and hope that all those who attend next week's meeting are going to enjoy the competition. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys will come up with.