Developer Challenge — rounding up the submissions
By: Linus Olsson
Tags: Contest, Challenge, Comeptition, Developers

Sunday midnight saw the deadline of our Developer Challenge. After gazing into the middle distance for about 30 seconds we decided to change the rules just a tiny bit and give all the teams an extra week to improve, polish, fix their products. Get user feedback, or approval by Apple to actually be downloadable from the App Store.

Here’s your chance to check them out and show them our support or take them apart by constructive criticism (and help create a better solution as a result). Here we go…

1. Improvements to Chrome extension by Eric K — Eric took our original extension and made it better. The new extension started to “sniff” all sites and pages that you visit, looking for Flattr button on them. It was such a good improvement that we actually rolled it into the official Flattr Chrome extension so all Chrome extension users already benefit from Eric’s work.

2. aFlattr has been around for some time and it puts an interesting twist on Flattr users buying goods from stores like Amazon, Endless.com, Javiari and a few others. When you have aFlattr browser extension active it adds an affiliate tag into the link earning aFlattr a comission of 4–10% depending on the product. That money is then transferred back to you so you can flattr more, for example. More info in their FAQ.

3. Flattr plugin for Plone content management system. According to Wikipedia high-profile public sector users include organizations like the FBI, Brazilian government, United Nations, City of Bern, New South Wales government, European Environment Agency. We’re not sure if they’ll ever start using the Flattr integration but hopefully millions of other Plone users will find it useful. Created by Christoph Glaubitz.

4. “Games und so” podcast iOS app — Timo Hetzel who’s one of the guys behind the German podcast “Games und so” decided to put Flattr right inside their podcast app. Although my German skills are somewhat faded flattring a podcast was dead simple. No need to download the app, you can check out a demo video or screenshots.

5. Flattr Video Browser which according to Christopher Käck “allows you to browse through trending videos on Flattr and watch them directly on the site”. It’s a great way for killing some time, leaving it up to chance and fellow flattr users to surprise you with fascinating clips.

[caption id=”attachment_6233" align=”aligncenter” width=”600" caption=” “]

[/caption]

6. Flattrama is a Flattr client for Windows Phone 7. It’s currently available for the Windows marketplace beta users but you’ll get a sense of it just by looking at the screenshots Pixel Valley guys posted in their blog and this demo video.

7. Flattr integration in Instacast and Instacast HD (by Vemedio) brings flattrability into the first popular podcatcher application. It does require the podcast publisher to add payment link tags into their podcast feeds (alternatively they can add a simple Flattr button into show notes) but once that’s done it’s a matter of couple of screen taps for the listeners to flattr them. The app is not free and it’s available on iPhone and iPad so Vemedia put up some screenshots as demo.

8. Interesting Things is a simple data spinning by Tom Hukins that pulls the most popular Flattr Things and tags to make it easier to discover the very-very popular stuff. Not much else to say about this one.

9. Perl interface to the Flattr API. This one’s also by Tom and does what it says on the tin.

10. flattr4j — another useful tool comes from Shred and is a Java library that supports almost all of the new Flattr API features. It primarily targets business grade integration e.g. on servers, websites and full-featured desktop applications. It can also be used to build integration into Android devices.

11. Continuing with tools — JavaScript client for Flattr API from Simon Ljungberg. Comes with helpers for authentication and functions for every API resource. Simon says that the goal is to make it work in both the browser and in a NodeJS environment.

12. FlattrPod is an iPhone app for flattring podcasts playing in the default Music.app. You can check out the interaction and screenshots at Boris Buegling’s site.

[caption id=”attachment_6235" align=”aligncenter” width=”300" caption=” “]

[/caption]

13. MntFlattrest — another iOS app from Simon Ljungberg that makes it easy to browse the trending Things on Flattr by category, check them out and open them in mobile browser. You can connect your account and flattr things in-app. So far all we have is a short demo video, hopefully Simon gets the app out by Monday morning when judging starts.

14. Open Aid Charity mashes up live mapping interface that highlights real-time events being broadcasted by civilian reporters, points out the humanitarian organizations in those regions and let’s you flattr them to support them in solving those crisis. It’s created by Petter Samuelsen and Pierre Gomez.

[caption id=”attachment_6236" align=”aligncenter” width=”600" caption=” “]

[/caption]

15. FlatDrop implements Flattr as a soft paywall on Soundcloud meaning that you can listen to the tracks as normal but to download you have to Flattr it. The author Johan says that it needs quite a bit of polish, let’s hope he uses the extra week for that :) You can check how it looks like from the end user point of view on his own track.

16. Fundd.de is a mashup of Quora/Stack Exchange-like knowledge platform where in addition to the usual upvoting there’s an additional motivation of earning flattrs for intriguing and intelligent questions and expert answers. The big question of course is “How does Fundd differ from Quora?”. Created by Ahmet Topal.

fundd.de — Fund ‘N Discover Creativity. from Ahmet Topal on Vimeo.

17. Phlattr is “a proof of concept for integrating text messaging for flattring individual via their phone numbers”. Connect your Flattr, add some phones, send some love. Texting gratitude, we like that :) Made by Benjamin Young. Update: Unfortunately Benjamin couldn’t get the SMS part working with Tropo so he dropped out of the competition. However, we’ll leave this up here, maybe someone will get inspired by the idea.

Who’s your favorite so far? What’s the biggest idea? Best implementation? Potentially the one that gets the most traction and users?