The NANY Challenge 2010 :: Wrap UpEvery year on DonationCoder, we run a special community event called "NANY: New Apps for the New Year". And once again the event has proven to be great fun and exciting for everyone involved -- we've watched as coders of all levels pit their skills against themselves, as they worked to fulfill their NANY Pledge and release a new free application by the first of the new year.
A total of 23 coders pledged to release a new free application by the 1st of the new year. And in the end there were
26 NANY Releases (and several small mini-releases).
As we always do in this event, we saw a wide range of submissions, from full professional-quality applications, to small toy experiments by novice coders, and everything in-between. And all of the releases are now available and free for public use -- just click on a link below to go to the release page and download link.
This year we've also tried something new -- we've made screencast videos of most of the entries so you can take a look at the entries in action without ever leaving this page.
General Interest Entries
These General Interest applications should be of interest to all computer users of any experience level.
AnuranAnuran is a rotating, automatic-prompting personal text log. All files are stored as plain text for easy manipulation, and the program includes powerful search functionality and archiving features.
This is one of my favorite entries; it's a really elegant and unobtrusive tool for keeping track of time spent on a project and quick notes. -- mouser
What's My Share?What's my share is an online web page that lets you put in a total amount, a list of people and their percentages, and then it will calculate how much each person owes. Includes features for automatic normalization and easy equalized splitting.
This is another one of my favorites; takes a simple idea and implements it perfectly, with a few cool new twists -- mouser
Piggy BanksPiggy Banks makes it easy for you to keep track of 'fund' accounts where a little money is put away each day. For example, your family might decide that every day $1 will be put aside to help pay for a new board game. Piggy Banks will make it easy to see how much money is saved up in the board game fund at any time.
ClipTrapClipTrap watches the clipboard and accumulates clipboard-copied text in its window. A minimalist clipboard tool which can often be more useful than the big boys -- it simply appends each new clip into the memo for subsequent use.
BestimateBestimate is a utility designed to help you become more accurate and realistic about your predictions and promises. Add items like "Number of pages I will write this week" or "Number of pounds i will lose this month", and provide your predicted/promised values. Then, at the end of the time period, record your actual achieved values. Bestimate keeps track of how far off you were from your initial prediction/promise.
SubDivSubDiv was built to organize folders that are constantly being filled with new content, such as a 'Downloads' folder. When you are continually throwing files from the Internet into a folder on your computer, that folder becomes very disorganized -- SubDiv will take those files and put them into folders based on the day they were created.
Find and Run Robot (FARR) PluginsAll these Entries are Find and Run Robot (FARR) Plugins, and therefore require the main FARR program to be installed in order to use them. FarrWebMetaSearchFarrWebMetaSearch is a generic web retrieval FARR plugin -- it performs live search-as-you-type seearching of certain websites and parses results for display in standard list mode. You can even add your own custom regular-expression based search configurations to query new websites.
FARRSpell This is a plugin for Find and Run Robot to help people who quickly need to spell a word or look up synonyms.
FARR Plugin ProcessInfoThis is a plugin to display information about running processes either on the PC or a remote PC.
Games
These applications are for fun and entertainment!
Leap of FaithThis is a proof-of-concept platformer game where the goal is to climb to the top of the screen and reach the exit, while the world shifts all around you.
TwigatelleTwigatelle is a simple game developed in Java inspired by any number of those pachinko-type games where little thingies bounce around hitting other thingies in a slightly hypnotic way.
Special Purpose
These Special Purpose applications are generally for the more experienced user, either because of the purpose of the application or the expertise required to install/run the application.
Page Countster The application is a small, portable, fast, & simple to operate programme that reports on network printers: model, page counts, serial numbers & etc.
This program stirred up a lot of interest on various blogs when it was first previewed and seems to have been a big hit and satisfied a real need out there -- mouser
LittleRunnerA little application for runners to help them log their runs and track their performance over time.
Multiboot ISO MakerMultiboot ISO Maker is a very powerful graphical front end for creating multiboot ISO images. It uses the free mkisoft back end and supports all mkisofs options.
Create Dummy FileThis is a program for creating large dummy files in several different ways. One notable feature is the ability to fill the free space on a USB disk, so that it's hard for malware to put new files on the drive.
Reimbursement Tracker This is a tool created to help a user manage his/her reimbursable expenses and designed to create an attractive, easy to read, and easy for the boss to understand list. It has the ability to print, or to print a professional-looking receipt to a thermal printer (receipt printer) or normal printer.
SwoopoSpy SwoopoSpy keeps track of several auctions at once on the Swoopo auction site.
Startup BullyEvery once in awhile you come across an otherwise good application with one single nasty little fault: Every time you run it, it insists on sticking a shortcut file in your Startup folder and has no option to opt out of this behavior. You delete the shortcut and the next time you run the application it comes right back. Startup Bully will opt out for you by removing this unwanted shortcut each time you run the offending application.
TrayUpTime Small utility to place an icon in the system tray which shows the system up time as a tooltip when you hover over it with the mouse.
j2key A small autohotkey app that lets you map your typical 10-button joypad (think dualshock clone) to keyboard keys. Nothing too fancy, but if you open the thing up you'll see it's pretty easy to solder buttons. I used to use this when doing kiosks (is far easier than mapping a keyboard).
DupFind DupFind is a cross-platform Python script that will search for the duplicate files on your harddrives. Because it is a Python script it will run on any OS where Python is installed.
Open Menu By providing a single, controlled specification for restaurant menus Open Menu will ensure that restaurant menus can be easily shared and used by others. From Restaurant Locaters based on a menu item to tools for finding restaurants based on what you're looking to spend, Open Menu provides the foundation for such tools. Includes an online tool for creating menus in the xml-based OMF format.
Library Management System Library Management System is a web-based tool written in Python for keeping track of your personal book collection and who you've loaned copies of your books to. NOTE: Requires a webserver with WSGI and SSL capabilities (such as Apache with mod_wsgi and mod_ssl) and lxml and python-amazon-product-api packages for Amazon support.
Crush MCP This program is an early proof-of-concept tool for monitoring launched applications and reporting when new ones are found running. It's not yet suitable for real deployment but suggestions are welcome from the author.
Artwinauto BlitzType BlitzType is an early alpha build of a utility that aims to perform autocompletion of frequently typed words and phrases and abbreviations, by automatically learning and saving repeated phrases as the user types. Not yet suitable for real deployment, but suggestions are welcomed by the author.
fenixContacts FenixContacts is a customizable contacts book with support for completely customizable fields. Still in early development but the author welcomes feature suggestions.
Mini NANY Submissions
Mini NANYs are submissions that don't quite meet the normal criteria for full NANY entries -- such as small scripts or early tests.
You can find the mini-nany entries scattered throughout the
NANY 2010 forum section, including:
The Head-in-the-Clouds Gang Visits DonationCoder.com
Throughout the course of the NANY event, we were thrilled that cartoonist, coder, and dc member Tim S. not only submitted an entry but also created some great web comic strips to share with us.
Relive Twiggles NANY journey:
What is NANY?
New Apps for the New Year (NANY) is an annual event at DonationCoder where we ask coders of all skill levels to Pledge that they will release a new free application before the new year. The rules are very simple and are posted in the
Instructions Thread.
There is always a lot of interest from the general computing public who are keen to offer suggestions and ideas for possible projects; the
2010 Suggestion Thread contained lots of discussion and ideas for this year's projects.
This year we had 29 people make a pledge in the
Pledges Thread, 23 of whom were successful in posting their application on the
NANY Boards before New Year.
Feedback can be given to the coder through his NANY post, and the NANY board generally stays pretty active through the year as coders polish their entries and implement new suggestions from users.
NANY events were held previously in
2009,
2008 and
2007. The next NANY event will open in November 2010 -- please join us!!
THANKS!
My sincere thanks to everyone who participated:
- Entrants
- Volunteers
- DC Members who tested and gave valuable feedback and suggestions
- And the others NANY Team members: mouser, nudone, hamradio; without whom I'd look more nonproductive and unprofessional.
- Thanks to Head in the Clouds for allowing us this view into the whole NANY process!
-Perry Mowbray, NANY 2010 Coordinator
