The NANY Retrospective Thread

[mouser]

Hard to believe that there have now been seven (7) previous NANY events.  That's seven years that some of us having been writing new applications to celebrate the new year.  Crazy.  Time goes by so quickly.

I thought maybe we could have a thread where some of us coders who have participated in NANY could look back at our previous entries and comment on them.. Most NANY apps didn't have much of a life beyond the event, but i know a few have had an interesting history..

If you participated in a past year's NANY event, post a reply and talk about your past entries and what you learned, etc..

[hamradio]

My NANY 2008 Entry was: Coin Jar Calculator @ Forum Topic

It's still going great.  I have had at least one asking about buying the domain name alone recently.  It was also a "Cool Site of the Day" in 2011 for The Kim Komando Show on their website.  Every so often new users will decide to leave a comment in the comment system saying how it did for them and when did right it seems to do great.  It's the only one of the ones I have did that I will comment on in this thread at the moment.

[mouser]

To this day i enjoy reading the comments that people leave on your coincalc.com website.

It goes to show how a nice focused web app can be a lasting source of use.

[Renegade]

Most NANY apps didn't have much of a life beyond the event, but i know a few have had an interesting history..

Hahaha! Yep - that about sums up my submissions. A few had some nice comments, but that's about all. It was still fun though.

I was always paranoid about not being able to finish something, so I never "pledged" until I had something done.

[ewemoa]

Hahaha! Yep - that about sums up my submissions.

Ditto minus the interesting history bit

Learned a fair bit which unexpectedly turned out be useful later and had fun though  

[worstje]

JottiQ has pretty much fallen into non-development. There was a guy who donated  and asked for a feature I sadly couldn't deliver on. :-( In the end, I consider JottiQ feature-complete; most of the things people want are stuff that has to happen on the server end that I do not control. :-)

Cautomaton never really had users to my knowledge. Except mouser maybe; I recall he added support or a template or something in one of his robots, so maybe it had more use than I've come to hear about. :-)

All my other apps were 3-4 day hackfests that never got released because I started too late and later on lost interest in finishing them. Ah well. Maybe this year!

[TaoPhoenix]

I got the misc distinction of carving out a niche in the rules whereby you could be a flighty humanities type and still get into nany ... if the app was custom produced and never released anywhere else. And one day when I get more funding I'll do another one.

I lost the source code to my PGN chess moves processor though, so it's now kinda officially EOL. However, it marks an interesting phase in my personality - it must right be at the cusp of the last year when I had hope that computers were cool and not NSA spy tools!
  - the Matrix and C64 themes make me giggle.

But for the core purpose, it does what it does - I hauled it out a few months ago to smash out a few pages of game moves to take to the bar again. Total processing time was 15 min flat! So I'm satisfied.

[app103]

I am still using my Lacuna Launcher, religiously.

And a new PC means that I am back to using Popup Cody. 

And I have never stopped using Trout. In fact, it's playing right this minute. 

And I have a whole slew of ideas for this year, and a lot of them are more than doable, so you WILL see something new from me for this year's NANY. 

Oh, and it's kind of chilly here right now, so I am wearing my NANY2009 jacket, trying to stay warm.

[wraith808]

I've had some hits and some misses.

• Skyrim Character Manager has by far been my biggest success, both personally and with the users.  Unfortunately, I haven't been as timely as I should have been, or it would be even more popular.
• AutoFTP has been my second, even to the point that someone tried to usurp the software and sell it and steal the name.
• XLDataAnalyzer was only really used by the person I made it for to my knowledge
• Swoopo changed their interface, and then went out of business, so SwoopoSpy never found any use other than for me to my knowledge.
• I never went any further with WordCaster- a few people asked me to update it, but I never got around to it, unfortunately.
• Desktop URL Embed was the most surprising.  It was a last minute thing, and I just didn't want to let NANY down.  But it was the one that was actually featured on a few sites, and it was the simplest to do.

[Renegade]

Hahaha! Yep - that about sums up my submissions.

Ditto minus the interesting history bit

Ooops. Yep - minus the interesting history for me too.

[kyrathaba]

Counting this year's NANY, I've been involved in the event five different years ('07, '11, '12, '13, '14) and have contributed a total of one dozen applications. The app I had the most fun coding was "Found Money":

[attach]

[skwire]

I have a new program done and all ready to go, so this year will mark eight consecutive years of NANY for me (with a total of fifteen NANY programs released).  Good grief, where does the time go? 

I think, by far, my most popular NANY contribution has been ><Trout>.  Some other fairly popular submissions include Anuran, ClipTrap, and Snap DB.

Thanks, everybody, for all the support, comments, and suggestions over the years. 

[kyrathaba]

I wish I hadn't been otherwise occupied and failed to participate in 2008, '09, and '10   But, that's water under the bridge. This will be my fourth consecutive year, and I don't plan to leave any more gaps.

[TaoPhoenix]

I wish I hadn't been otherwise occupied and failed to participate in 2008, '09, and '10   But, that's water under the bridge. This will be my fourth consecutive year, and I don't plan to leave any more gaps.

Kyratha's Time Machine lets you go back in time and contribute to prior year NANYs!

[kyrathaba]

Hmm, I do have an app named How Long Since... perhaps I could add a time-travel feature...

[TaoPhoenix]

Abusing another thread:

WELCOME TO THE NANNY NANY STATE GOVERNMENT OF THE U.S.A DONATIONCODER!.

Some Acronyms can never be UnLearned!
Fear Mouser, for he made NANY one of them!

[justice]

Great thread. Last year's wordpress-basetheme has been a failure, not in functionality as it worked well for me in a few personal and work based projects. However it didn't gain traction with the DC community (or many others) so it wasn't the success of previous projects.

I thought there was some overlap between wordpress users and NANY users but apparently not, therefore I would recommend people to create software only.

Another thing I learned from previous years projects is: Do you want to support the project after the NANY is over? If so, how are you going to do that? Some of my other projects have been used very well but I haven't been motivated enough to pick up the support while there is momentum.

Hope that helps.

[wraith808]

^ I don't think that NANY is enough to give something like that traction.  *You* have to use it and evangelize it and be interested in it, from what I've seen.

Look at the OpenMenu NANY entry.  It took a while for it to gain traction, but it has, and I see it being used in places.

The short- end-user software gets immediate results; tools and concepts need evangelization.

But I will agree with you on the support.

[TaoPhoenix]

^ I don't think that NANY is enough to give something like that traction.  *You* have to use it and evangelize it and be interested in it, from what I've seen.

Look at the OpenMenu NANY entry.  It took a while for it to gain traction, but it has, and I see it being used in places.

The short- end-user software gets immediate results; tools and concepts need evangelization.

But I will agree with you on the support.

I dunno, "Tools" covers a bunch of stuff. You have to decide what "traction" means. Only by DC users? Elsewhere?

There's some 7-10 "tools" from here I use to the max. ScreenShot Captor (even though only one "feature" out of the zillions!), into Tom Revell's Stickies (not DC), then TranDesk from here from oddly not a NANY but a "C contest", Miles Ahead's BBSS mod that reads Firefox tabs and produces paired lists, my own "File Extension Toggle" that I contributed as a "Gift to DC", and a few other things. Chris G's UnzipSnack.

So when I find a tool I like here, I do evangelize it here and there!

[wraith808]

When I say tools as opposed to end-user type things, I mean concepts, ideas.  His was a concept.  Though you might consider some applications 'tools' from their use, they aren't tools in the way that a framework, or openmenu, or mouser's new mewlo project.

[kyrathaba]

Kyratha's Time Machine lets you go back in time and contribute to prior year NANYs!

@TaoPhoenix: I've temporarily suspended development of Time Machine. I'm being sued by some company claiming it infringes on their previous use of that title for some big flashy backup software. Also, we've lost six testers to temporal flux anomalies.

[TaoPhoenix]

Counting this year's NANY, I've been involved in the event five different years ('07, '11, '12, '13, '14) and have contributed a total of one dozen applications. The app I had the most fun coding was "Found Money":

Heh not that I've used this, I just dump all my change into mugs and plastic bags, but it did occur to me there's a funny potential feature.

"Wheat Pennies found". Ordinary pennies - Bleh. Tell the cashier "you can keep the pennies". You don't need the pennies. "Donating" 2-3 pennies to the cashier helps keep their manager from bitching at them if their drawer goes under for being nice to the next guy when they give out a quarter of change instead of actually counting out change. (Really Burger King? At least one of your meals costs $6.03?!) But Wheat Pennies. They're like Poor Man's Gold. Actually worthless, but fun to collect!

[kyrathaba]

Wheat pennies, hmm. Yep, I could add that. Could also add Susan B. Anthony dollars...

[TaoPhoenix]

Wheat pennies, hmm. Yep, I could add that. Could also add Susan B. Anthony dollars...

For me, it's the Wheat Pennies that haunt me. I keep giving back ordinary pennies to sales vendors because as +2 cents, it helps their drawer not to be under hence less chance of them getting yelled at by an uptight boss.

So if anything, I'd want "pennies donated" as a counter!  

But Wheat Pennies ... I know they're worthless, but dang if a penny from WWII doesn't inspire me!
(Hehe put in a text field *where* they are... because they always go "somewhere special" ... and then it moves! So the first four are on the Top Shelf, the next three are Next To The Book Case, etc!)

[Deozaan]

None of my entries have ever gotten much (if any) attention past the first month after release. I attribute that mostly to my entries not being of very high quality, and to me not being very responsive to feedback I've gotten.

But I enjoy it each year for the challenge and for the mugs!