Impact of the port-a-thons

Over the past few weekends BlackBerry has hosted some port-a-thon events in which they offered $100 for every BlackBerry 10 app submitted to BlackBerry World. I placed quite a few apps into the store during these weekends, but for the most part they were apps that I would have been working on anyhow, and mostly apps that I had already had up and running on the old BlackBerry OS. To be fair, developers such as myself were not the primary target for the event, but it did encourage me to create three more apps for the launch of BlackBerry 10 than I otherwise would have.

Animal Sounds app

The animal sounds app was mainly done as a challenge to see if I could complete an app in under 24 hours. The port-a-thon was mostly just an excuse to jump in and do so. It also provided a revenue model for the app. I knew going in that the app would not be good enough, that I could charge for it, and placing advertisements in apps aimed at kids has always struck me as being a bit sketchy. One hundred dollars easily was enough to cover the minimal effort that this app took.

Ebscer blog app

I also took the time to turn this blog into an app using the BlackBerry App Generator. In many ways this was just an excuse to try out the tool. Given that there is no way to actually test these apps on device before submitting them to AppWorld, I am still not sure what I am going to do with this app. Depending on how this app turns out, I may remove this one from the store.

Stuff I Need

Given the lack of a good simple grocery list app, it was probably inevitable that was going to write the Stuff I Need app sooner or later. Still the port-a-thon gave me a reason to jump in and write this about a month earlier than I otherwise would have. While this is not a huge app, it is one that I expect to find useful.