As I wrote a while ago, I had been having hosting troubles for this blog. Those days are now past, as last night, My Dream App web programmer Scott Meinzer helped me move the site over to a blazingly fast dedicated server, hosted by 1&1. (Major kudos to Scott. His internet was acting up so he actually drove over to his workplace to use their wifi in the car. I can't thank him enough.) I know, I know, some of you warned me about 1&1's service in the previous blog post, but no worries... I've had nothing but good service running a dedicated box with them for MDA.

What does that mean? Well, my site should now be completely Digg proof, and should run significantly faster. It's like a fresh install of OS X! I'm loving the snappiness.

And, probably of more interest to you guys, is I have not one, but three previews coming up for cool new apps (and a cool new update). The first should be up today or tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Ah, and a final note... I've been resisting posting about my ongoing project on this blog, with the misguided motivation of separating personal stuff from work, or something. But then I realized two things. First, it's cool stuff, so why not? Second, we've been giving away free apps, and I should've let you guys know! So. For a limited time, while Round 2 of voting just ended, along with the chance for voters to walk away with a free copy of the excellent Mori.

That's it for now... lots of stuff coming soon.

It's been non-stop for me over the past week as we've judged the thousands of entries that came in for My Dream App and picked 24 finalists. Here are my thoughts on them as a whole.

A good 80% were uninspired, infeasible (probably the most common reason for eliminating entries), or already done. 15% were decent but not well fleshed out. We were judging looking at the potential of an idea as well as its current form, but a lot of them just didn't have much beyond the one good idea. Continue reading...

It's been in the works for forever, and thanks to some amazing work by David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design, the new look for MacThemes is finally ready to be shown off. Of note, the nav bar itself probably took us a good three weeks to figure out as we had to come up with something functional and fitting in with the whole "designer's desk" theme we have going. Some of you designers out there can probably sympathize with the headaches the site's visual metaphor caused. But it's all good now.

To check out the designs, visit the just-started thread over at MacThemesForums here. MacThemes should be back up and running better than ever before by October. The cool part? This is only the first of some pretty cool GUI customization related news to come. I should have some pretty big news for you guys in the next week or two.

Check it out, and have fun! (And if you like it, Digg it )

Well, that was a dry stretch. Sorry about that, but I've been consumed by my current project for the past week, getting it ready for launch.

This is going to be the final teaser before My Dream App opens up, so I'm going to give you guys some substantial info, instead of the list of names that the last teaser basically was. Continue reading...

Ahh, finally back home. WWDC was quite a vacation, but now it's time to get back to work... on My Dream App of course.

I know the last teaser was relatively void of details, so consider this post Teaser 2, the Hollywood style sequel with less plot and more big name stars!

So first off, I know I said I was on vacation, but that's not entirely true. I did spend a good part of the break meeting up with people, discussing My Dream App, and inviting several of them to join the project as guest judges. (Gasp, judges?!) Below is a photo from a particularly awesome lunch that yielded three new guest judges for the event: Dave Watanabe (NewsFire and Acquisition), Allan Odgaard (Textmate and recent ADA winner), and Nick Jitkoff (Quicksilver). They'll be joining the much-talked about Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, and soon hopefully some other developers judging in that particular week.

From left to right, Austin Sarner, John Casasanta, Me, Nick Jitkoff, Jason Harris, Rosyna, Allan Odgaard, and Dave Watanabe

But that's not all, there's more! More guest judges I mean. Some other people who recently joined as well for guest judging for other weeks: lead TUAW blogger Scott McNulty, the Simonesque critic John Siracusa of Ars Technica's FatBits, Jim Dalrymple of Macworld, and the recently Business Week'd Kevin Rose of Digg. Then there's UI design guest judge week, with Adam Betts, Dave Lanham, Jasper Hauser, Piotr Gajos and Gedeon Maheux currently on board.

Developers? Bloggers? Tech media members? UI designers? Judging?! What is this??

Well, it wouldn't be a teaser without leaving some things for the imagination. But I'll leave you guys with this. I really, really believe this is going to revolutionize software development. Now, normally me just saying this alone would probably get tagged as crazy talk, but a lot of the people I mentioned share that belief, which is why quite a few of them joined the project on the spot. We're going to be lowering barriers and making things more transparent than ever, and it's going to result in some kickass software.

Oh, and I guess since it's obvious it's some sort of a competition, I might as well mention what we're trying to get together as prizes. Macbooks and iPods will be a small part of the prize packages. So dust off your thinking caps and start thinking killer app ideas!

I thought I caught a glimpse of one of our widgets at Widget Machine in the keynote yesterday, but as it turns out, there were two of them! Both VoiceNotes and Statosphere showed up in the brief display of the Dashboard. It's always cool seeing our products get some Apple loving! (And hopefully even more tonight, crossing my fingers about the Apple Design Awards.) Also a note, kudos to our friends at Monkey Business Labs get their Package Tracker widget shown there as well. Thanks to Engadget for the photo.

Well, as luck would have it, apparently even little rustic inns now have wifi access points, so I thought I'd post this quickie during my last evening in Ridgefield, CT.

After we launched WidgetMachine last year, our very first client for a custom Dashboard widget turned out to be Macworld thanks to the efforts of online content editor Jim Dalrymple who was very impressed with our website and products. You can read a bit about its development in this interview.

We're now in the process of updating the widget and I wanted to get some feedback from you guys on what you'd like to see with this. Now, ultimately, the Macworld staff will have final say on what features they want and do not want, and the initial version was affected pretty heavily by their requirements. But hearing the most common complaints and requests here as comments will help us gauge what's wanted. Below is Kenichi's initial mockup of a possible update, removing some extraneous weight from the widget and adding a scrollbar. (Click to see full size.):

Your feedback will be highly appreciated on this one! Current widget can be downloaded from here.