The NANY Challenge is an annual Challenge at DonationCoder where coders of all levels are challenged to pledge a New Application for the New Year and release it on January 1, 2010.

The NANY 2010 Challenge is generating a lot of interest again this year: so far we've had:

• 28 Pledges from our brave coders
• 13 Teasers to whet our appetites
• 8 Entries for us to try from the NANY Board

If you're desperate to get an entry in for this year and you have not Pledged: There's still time to join the NANY celebration! The idea is simple, and everyone is welcome to participate regardless of their skill level.  There are no winners, but everyone gets a prize -- a very handsome DonationCoder mug commemorating the event. If you know any coders, please give them a nudge and ask them to come by and give us a little bit of their time.  We know sometimes it's hard for coders to come up with good ideas, so we started a special thread just for people to post project ideas for others to consider working on; don't be shy posting your ideas.  And if you're a programmer, why not stop by the Pledge thread now and pledge to release something new by January 1 2010.  Help us make it something special -- we promise to make it fun!

Twigatelle Update
Here's the next update on Twiggles progress with his NANY 2010 entry: Twigatelle. Thanks to Head in the Clouds for allowing us this view into the whole NANY process!

Teasers / Entry Focus
fenixContacts
The main idea is just to create free and good contacts book application. For a long time I've seen dozen of tools which could make me happy but none of them did. The only reason is the lack of one feature: customisable information fields. This is the most important thing to me because in most of the cases I don't really need to see emptiness. I have never had a need for (i.e.) twenty business fields to be kept if all of them are blanks. I had found one application which could be OK but it was not free... so I've decided that someday I will write it by myself. And here I am!

Features

• Customizable Information Fields
• nice searching - both: LiveFilter and Advanced search
• import / export tool - with support for the most common file types (like vCards) or something more complicated (online databases handling)

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Create Dummy File 1.001
This software is to make files, of variable size, which do nothing. It's uses can be to test a disk, internet speed or to fill a free space on a USB disk. Once the USB is full, there will be no space left to write, so a virus will not be able to write to the USB disk.

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FarrWebMetaSearch
FarrWebMetaSearch is another generic web retrieval FARR plugin. Unlike ewemoas Webgrab this plugin will show results in list mode. It is therefore targeted at web sites delivering list-like results.

Features

• searches are configured via an ini files, one for each 'search'. The file will specify search url and a regular expression to capture the result.
• search terms will be specified through the FARR input box

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From a recent blog article:

I’m running my Mac indie software business for more than 3 years now. For the first 2.5 years all my sales went through Kagi and later I decided to switch to PayPal. The sales were not high, PayPal worked well and all was good.

This year, me and my partner Kosta decided to do some creative marketing for our application, ImageFramer. We decided to partner with several other developers of graphics software for the Mac and to sell all the software together, as a bundle, for 2 weeks. After months of preparations, negotiations and development, finally, MacGraPhoto bundle was launched on Nov 16.

We, at Apparent Software, were responsible for all the execution of the sale and part of it included handling all the money related issues, such as collecting the payments and distributing to other developers their shares. There were 6 other developers in addition to us. We corresponded over email, sent them a Terms and Conditions document and got their agreement to it by email.

We chose PayPal as our payment processor for several reasons but the main were low fees, the fact that we already knew how to integrate it to the sales backend and that it should be easy to pay them and to affiliates. We used our regular PayPal account, which we used for regular sales. We didn’t expect what happened next.

The launch was successful and we were pleased with how the sales progressed in the first days. Three days into the sale I’ve got a phone call from PayPal and the person on the other side asked me about nature of the spike in account activity. I explained that we had a 2 week sale, a special promotion and it looked like the call went fine.

What happened next and what they put these poor developers through can only be described as a complete nightmare. Paypal has since resolved the issue, but what happened to them could happen to anyone.

http://blog.apparent...paypal-horror-story/

Looks like I have a new site to put on my regular reading list.  This is a nice summary of why google ads are corrupting web searches and making it hard to find useful content.

Over the weekend I tried to buy a new dishwasher. Being the fine net-friendly fellow that I am, I  began Google-ing for information. And Google-ing. and Google-ing. As I tweeted frustratedly at the tend of the failed exercise, "To a first approximation, the entire web is spam when it comes to appliance reviews".  This is, of course, merely a personal example of the drive-by damage done by keyword-driven content -- material created to be consumed like info-krill by Google's algorithms.
...
Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.  The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.  Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But it's hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem. Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility.
...
Something has to give, but I wonder what will -- the snake, its tail, or us?

http://paul.kedrosky...dishwashers_dem.html

NANY 2010 early release program "Page Countster" by DC member Stoic Joker was featured on makeuseof.com today:

http://www.makeuseof...with-page-countster/

I have multiple offices with lots and lots of printers. Some networks are on Active Directory and some are not. Some are configured with print servers and some are not. Now when I am asked for a printer status report for a specific office or warehouse I have a lot of digging to do. There are applications out there that could help but nothing that is easy to use and portable.

The creator of this printer inventory tool created it for his environment where they needed quick tallies of what was going on the network with printers – and it had to be easy enough for a sales person to use – gasp!

A rather long write up and with a bunch of screenshots.

I mostly use aardvark (that I found through a recommendation in this forum) before printing. Now there's a new one at http://css-tricks.co...s/ThePrintliminator/ 

STOP PRESS: Pledge Deadline extended to Friday December 18th!!
Due to popular demand we've extended the Pledge Deadline by a week to December 18th. There's still time to make your pledge in the NANY 2010 Pledge to Participate Here thread and get in on the fun!

N.A.N.Y. is the annual event on DonationCoder.com is where we invite, cajole, blackmail, bribe and just generally beg all of the programmers who pass through the site to pledge to release some new piece of free software on January 1st. The idea is simple, and everyone is welcome to participate regardless of their skill level.  There are no winners, but everyone gets a prize -- a very handsome DonationCoder mug commemorating the event.

Twigatelle Update
Each year we focus on Teasers and Entries that are being developed through December; this year we have a very special opportunity to journey with one of DonationCoder's intrepid coders, Twiggles, who is developing Twigatelle for N.A.N.Y 2010. Thanks to Head in the Clouds for allowing us this view into the whole NANY process!



Featured Teasers
DupFind: A simple, graphical application that scans a directory tree and reports any duplicate files found. OS's supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS/X (and possibly others like OpenSolaris)

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Traitor: Traktor doesn't have a sampler. A DJ set is not complete without the annoying siren. Teddy doesn't do MIDI nor ASIO. You figure it out.

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FARR Plugin ProcessInfo: I'm a sysadmin by trade, and I frequently need to get quick information about processes running on a machine (either my own or a remote PC).  I also frequently need to know what files the process is actually using at any given moment.  And I don't necessarily want to have to access the machine directly to get that information. While there are tools already available that give me that information, none of them are particularly fast about giving it to me, and none of the are as intutive as a FARR alias/plugin could be.  So I wrote this to be the fast, simple tool that I as an admin need to get information quickly.


Recent Releases
ClipTrap: ClipTrap watches the clipboard and keeps track of copied text in its window.  I initially wrote it for my workplace where we use terminal emulators (SecureCRT, PuTTY, etc.) constantly and often need to capture several successive bits of output from various routers, switches, and other devices on the network.  I fleshed it out and prettied it up for NANY 2010.  I use this in conjunction with ArsClip, a fantastic clipboard caching tool.

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Page Countster: The company I work for re-manufactures laser printer toner cartridges as a primary (cost center) product. We needed a way to quickly find out how many printers were on a customers network, what model they were, their page counts, serial numbers, toner levels & etc. The application had to be small, portable, fast, & simple enough for the sales staff to operate...


Mini NANY Submissions
A Mini NANY does not come under the same stringent rules that a normal NANY does and can include script and other submissions that don't really fit into NANY proper.

• Gobbledegook: Mix up your sentences and keep readability.
• Gamers Alarm Clock: GAC is a simple alarm clock, albeit with a slight twist.