Ok, it finally time for the other shoe to drop. Your humble preDevCamp organizers have reviewed all the applications submitted, reached a consensus, and are ready to announce the winners of the preDevCamp application contest. The winning applications are:

You may notice that one of the original categories, System Utilities, is missing. No qualifying entries were submitted for this category. Therefore, the productivity and reference category was split into two categories since there were many qualified entries in each of these two areas.

We appreciate your patience while we reviewed all the submissions. Our congratulations to the contest winners!!!!!

Dan, Greg, and Lisa

Edit 9/22/09 3:04 pm – And the crowd favorite award goes to TipCalc!

Winners, watch for an email with instructions on how to claim your prize.

You’ve been patient with us and we’re grateful for that.

You’ll need to be a little more patient; the judging of the preDevCamp Homebrew apps is taking a little longer than anticipated, but we’re hoping to be able to announce the winners within the next 7 days.

We’ll keep you posted!

What a great day we had!

Apps were built, Pres were rooted, Pizza was eaten…

preDevCamp was a big event, but we want to keep things rolling. Many of the local events have spawned local Pre Coder Groups and we see many events coming down the line.

The three of us are looking for volunteers to help us provide the support needed to make these events happen. preDevCamp became a big job, very quickly, and we realize that it’s not a three person job. As such, we’d like to add to our numbers. You’ll have an opportunity to shape the future of preDevCamp as well as be a major part of an ever-growing global community.

Right now, we’re just looking for interested people. Expressing your interest isn’t committing you to anything just yet.
Global organizers will not be personally responsible for a specific event (although they can also do this; the three of us organized our local events as well as the global effort). What we’re looking for are people willing to share the burden of the global effort. We’ll be providing more details once we have a list of interested people.

If you’d like to volunteer, please email global@predevcamp.org Please Note The Address!
Please email by midnight PST, Friday August 28.

Look forward to hearing from you

So I want to talk more about the developer challenge we announced on August 8th.  The whole goal of preDevCamp is to get people writing apps and learning from each other and get people excited about the possibilities the pre can offer.  So with precentral’s help, we’ve created a competition; the winner will receive a Pre!

Categories

Media:  Creating or managing music, photos, or videos
Communication:  Making it easier to get a message from point A to point B
Games:  Tapping, wiping, and shaking just for fun.
Productivity and Reference:  notes, todo list managers, unit conversion,
System utilities:  Things that make the Pre more hackable or configurable

And keep it smart, guys.  We can’t accept a tethering app or anything that breaks anybody’s terms of use.

Questions

1. Are existing homebrew apps eligible?
   Yes, and I thought a lot about this.  Want to be fair, but it would suck if this contest alienated the passionate developers who are already out there writing apps.  So the best compromise is that homebrew devs may submit their apps, but they must add 2-3 new features.  Applications in the App Catalog are not eligible, but those developers can still submit a new app.
2. How will the apps be judged?  What are the criteria?
   originality of idea (do you have any idea what it would take for a new twitter client to swoop in and win this??)
   utilization of pre api’s.  How does the pre make your app more awesome.
   and since we are going to be comparing existing apps to newer ones, we’re not necessarily judging on completeness of the idea.  We wanna see what you can come up with and where you can go with it.
3. How will the free phones be delivered?
   To allow for people who may already have a pre or isn’t able to change carriers, winners will actually receive $200 via paypal or visa gift card.  We just hope that if you want a Pre, you can use this money to go buy one.
4. Can you submit an entry as a team?
   Yes, and if your app wins then you can choose to receive the full prize or have the value split across multiple gift cards
5. Who are the judges?
   We don’t have this finalized yet, but we’re working on a deal with some celebrity judges.  As a last resort, Dan, Greg, and I will judge.
6. When’s the deadline?
   You can start working on your apps now!
   Submit by aug 15th.  That’s essentially four days from now and one week after preDevCamp.  But you can submit any time starting saturday.
   Judging runs until aug 22nd, and users can start voting as soon as the app hits the homebrew gallery.
   Announce on aug 26th
7. Can you win in more than one category?
   Ehhh…probably not.

In order to enter, head on over to precentral.net and request Developer Access on their contact form. PreCentral will provide you with all the details you need for submission.

Good Luck! Can’t wait to see what you come up with

I had intended to announce the winners on Saturday, but there was just so much awesomeness going on in San Diego that I didn’t get around to it. But now that your humble organizers are getting caught back up, we’ve picked six lucky winners from the pool of 1161 entries!

 
 
 
 
The first winner is @akiliking. By broadcasting his intent to attend preDevCamp Dallas to the world, he won $50 from the PreCentral.net Accessory Store. Congrats!

 
 
 
 
I was so tickled when random.org generated the line number corresponding to this tweet from @acarback. Alice did a fantastic job organizing PDC Baltimore and generated a ton of great content that helped out other cities.

 
 
 
 
@rstoeber may have been working all by himself on Saturday, but his contributions still helped make Saturday the amazing success it was. Thank you, Robert!

 
 
 
 
Miami was doing a ton of last minute scrambling to get an event together, and I think details actually came together sometime on Saturday morning. Thanks @vara411 for helping spread the word!

 
 
Chillin’ indeed! @jamie3d was one of the San Diego attendees who came with tons of great questions and enthusiasm. Jamie, I hope this $50 helps you on your quest for webOS development!

 
 
 
 
 
 
And last but not least, I was not surprised at all to see @asmathews turn up as a winner. He was doing some major retweeting all week, and I’m happy to give him some recognition for all his help.

His tweet does remind me, though…your local organizer should have announced that PreCentral has given us a super secret discount code for 10% off purchases to the Accessory Store. This code is so amazingly secret that you’ll never be able to figure it out unless you were at an event. Never ever.

Winners, please email me and I’ll give you instructions on how to claim your prize. Thank you everyone who participated in the contest!

Everyone at Palm is really excited to see what we’ll come up with today, especially Palm CTO Mitch Allen (he wrote the webOS book many of you just got). He was kind enough to help us kick-start our day by sending this video.

Notable points:
1. We rock
2. “Tens of thousands” of developers have downloaded the SDK
3. 2.5 million downloads from the App Catalog
4. WebOS and Synergy are unlike anything you’ve ever seen before

Couldn’t have said it any better. Let’s build some killer apps!

Alice is kicking ass and taking names over in Baltimore, or at least taking down these links for you to learn more about getting started with webOS. This’ll be a great place to start in the morning!

The first chapter of “Palm webOS” from O’Reilly (but remember you’ll likely get your very own copy tomorrow!)

O’Reilly Webcast: Developing Applications for Palm webOS

O’Reilly Webcast: Automated Unit Testing with Palm Mojo SDK

Spaz, an Open Source Twitter Client
http://wiki.github.com/funkatron/spazcore
http://github.com/funkatron/spaz-webos/tree/master

UPDATE: More links!

http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps
http://forums.precentral.net/web-os-development
http://developer.palm.com/distribution
http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps
http://www.precentral.net/how-to-install-homebrew-apps

Alice Carback has some great ideas in Baltimore for how non-developers can…nay, are NEEDED to help at preDevCamp:

* Make an Omnigraffle or Visio stencil
* Test other people’s applications
* Help with planning and wire framing
* Come up with app ideas
* Help developers with CSS
* Learn HTML, JavaScript, and CSS — our event will be a library!
* Help your local organizer keep their sanity

If you can think of anything else, let us know in the comments!

Wow! You guys never quit!

We just got a rash of registration requests for new cities. These organizers have a lot of work ahead of them, so if you’re local to them and interested in having a preDevCamp near you, get in touch with them and help them out:

• St. Louis
• Louisville
• Indianapolis
• Cincinnati
• Minneapolis
• Humacao

Now that we’re getting down to the wire, we’re discovering that a number of cities don’t have an active organizer.  Which is totally our fault, and be assured that we want to punish ourselves appropriately.

But we still want everyone to attend an event, so we’re coming out of time out long enough to give you this list of orphaned cities:

• Houston Adopted by Anthony Garcia (@anthgar)
  
• Boston Adopted by John R. Tomawski (@nebj00la)
• Orlando Adopted by Kevin Rohling and Roy Marquez
• Omaha Adopted by Flye Rosal and Carl Zulauf (@exmancer)
• Portland Adopted by Jordan Gensler (@kense)
• Amsterdam
• Miami
• Chicago Adopted by Max, and we just found you a venue!  Details coming soon.
• New York Adopted by BlueSwitch (@blueswitch)
• Seattle Adopted by Dave Peck (@dangerdave)
• St. Louis Adopted by Jeremy Alms
• Austin Adopted by Dan Rumney (@dancrumb)
• Charlotte

If you can adopt one of the cities on this list, please contact Dan asap.  Once you’re set up, you’ll be able to post to your city’s blog to keep folks updated on your status, and you can email other attendees to enlist their help.

And if you see that your city was recently adopted, it’ll be a huge help to your organizer to volunteer  however you can.  Give him/her some venue ideas and offer to present.  Even getting feedback that other people really care is a huge motivation.

This all may sound intimidating, but once you get a few passionate minds working together, you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.  Remember, the first barcamp was organized in a week.  You can do this!

PS:  If you discover any more cities who need help, please let us know in the comments.

UPDATE:  There’s a ton of last minute organizing activity on twitter today, so try doing a search for preDevCamp <yourcity> for the latest details.