Dale Zak organized the first Hackathon last July in Halifax which produced two apps, Wish You Were Here supporting Feed Nova Scotia and Meet Me Here, supporting Phoenix Youth. This year we had events in Halifax, Saskatoon and Montreal with teams working on seven new apps as well as updating our existing apps.

MindSea was proud to help organize and sponsor the Halifax event, and I am happy to report that we had over 25 people show up to donate their skills. Our push this year was to get more marketers and designers and I think we handily met that goal. Each team had a couple of designers and marketers which was really nice to see and made a big difference in our productivity. This extra horse-power allowed the Halifax team to take on four apps!

• Sushi Hiro – in support of Stepping Stone is a Sushi making game for the iPad
• Artists 4 Good – in support of Clean Nova Scotia is an iPad wallpaper app that show cases local artists
• Swipey-Tappy – in support of Leave Out Violence – a game that works similar to the simon says genre of games but using gestures and taps
• Stick Person Theatre – in support of Joints In Motion – an application that allows you to create stick person animations in interesting situations like walking on the moon

Saskatoon had a great turnout as well and they are building some great apps. Here is how Dale Zak described the apps in his post about the weekend.

WeDJ, a social DJ’ing app with a twist that will benefit Choc’laCure who help raise funds for the Saskatoon Cancer Centre, CoachPad a handy sports team sketchpad that supports North East Outreach a small non-profit charitable organization in Melfort, Saskatchewan that provides 24 hour crisis hotline and finally ShouldI, a social decision maker that will benefit Saskatoon Friendship Inn who provide breakfast and lunch for over 500 people daily.

Well, now we head in to the most important stage: finishing the apps, getting the word out and getting the proceeds into the hands of the charities. We have an extremely dedicated group of volunteers that have committed to getting these apps done, so stay tuned over the next little while and you will see some shiny new apps in the App Store.

I would like to thank Dale Zak for coming up with this crazy idea and keeping everyone motivated; his energy level and commitment to social change is unwavering.

The iHackathon in the news

For more information about Apps 4 Good and our mission check out the website at www.Apps4Good.ca

Check out the iHackathon segment in episode 214 of CommandN.tv, around the 5:00 minute mark.

Michelle Doucette took some fantastic photos for us this year.

We had some nice coverage on CBC both east and west:

• Developing iPhone Apps for Charity
• Sask. Developer builds apps for charity

In July of 2009 Dale organized the first “iPhone Hackathon For Charity” which brought together some very talented people who have a common desire to support their community. The goal of the hackathon was to create as many iPhone applications as possible over a weekend, publish them to the Apple App store and direct all the proceeds to charity. I have to admit that this goal seemed quite unrealistic at first, but as the weekend progressed I became more and more convinced that this was going to work and that we could accomplish some really great things! While the weekend didn’t produce any finished apps we had a great start and we chose some great charities that would benefit. The team I was on chose to create an application that allows people to send digital postcards. You select a cool postcard, add a photo and caption and send it to your pals. Inspired by many postcards collected during sunny summer vacations we decided to call it “Wish You Were Here”. (and hey.. it ties in nicely with our other app “Meet Me Here”).

As often happens with volunteer projects like this, other commitments (like work ) can slow you down. Motivated by our second, albeit smaller, hackathon “Another day of Good” held in October, we put a push on to get “Meet Me Here” and “Wish You Were Here” out the door. After a few more impromptu late night hacking sessions, Meet Me Here was ready to go and was published, and available for download on December 1st. Having our first application up and generating money for charity motivated our WYWH team even more. We went through a couple of rounds of usability testing and came up with a flow that we thought was simple and intuitive. Combine that with some beautifully designed postcards and application graphics and we were set to go! On December 29th, WYWH was ready for sale in the Apple app store. The folks on the Apple app review team really turned this around quickly. It went in for review in the morning and came out ready for sale later that night! Thanks for that! The WYWH team plans to keep adding more features to the application, like twitter and facebook integrations, image editing controls, and many more postcard designs.

All of the proceeds from WYWH will go to Feed Nova Scotia, the provincial food collection and distribution centre for approximately 150 food banks and meal programs across Nova Scotia. They provide year-round food deliveries to member food banks and meal programs who serve at least 38,000 Nova Scotians each month. To learn more about how you can help, please visit their website www.feednovascotia.ca

So, what started out as an informal weekend hack has turned into a full fledged corporation dedicated to giving back to the community. We have started the ball rolling with our first two applications, and more are in the works…. so what’s next? Well, we will be hosting another hackathon in the new year, who knows what that will bring, but I have a feeling we will have many more participants and we will come up with some great apps in support of excellent charities! If you would like to join us, head over to apps4good.ca and drop us a line…

Wish You Were Here,
Bill Wilson

Here are a few screen shots of WYWH in action:

The Wish You Were Here team members:

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