Zhephree

So, as you may have seen on Twitter late last night, I submitted incredible! for the TouchPad to Palm. It’s patiently awaiting the folks in Sunnyvale to wake up and approve it.

And, as many of you recall, I held a campaign about a year ago for the community to donate money towards the development of incredible!. One of the bonuses of donating was that, aside from other random rewards (which are still coming! I promise!), your name would appear in the About dialog of the app (everyone’s does!), and, most importantly, you would receive a copy of the app, gratis.

So, since the app is TouchPad-only right now, this is really easy for me: I’ll just generate some Promo Codes, e-mail them to all the donors, and boom! Free app.

However, I know not everyone has a TouchPad, so not everyone will get the app. I can’t do too much for those folks, but, obviously, if I ever finish the phone version of incredible!, obviously, they’ll get a copy.

But! If, in lieu of having a TouchPad and wanting to wait for the phone version, you still feel like you need something as a reward for making a donation to an independent developer, I will make it up to you by offering a copy of neato! for free. I know it’s not the same thing, but it’s all I have.

So, I’ll be e-mailing all 200 or so donors and asking what you’d like to receive, if anything. Once I get a response from you, I’ll send your reward. Please note! The e-mail will be coming from geoff (AT) zhephree.com, so please, if your donated t the cause, make sure to add that address to your email client’s whitelist so that it doesn’t get spam-filtered. I am only sending this e-mail once (there’s 200 of you!), so I can’t be held responsible if your email client or ISP eats the email.

To Recap:

If You Have a TouchPad:

• When you receive my e-mail, let me know that you’d like to claim your copy of incredible!
• I will respond to you with a one-time use Promo Code to allow you to download the app for free.

If You Don’t Have a TouchPad:

• When you receive my e-mail, let me know that you do not have a TouchPad. You then have two options:

1. Let me know you want to wait and take a gamble that I’ll finish the Mojo/Phone version of incredible! (No guarantee)
2. Let me know you’d rather receive a copy of neato! for free. This will void any claims to a free copy of incredible! in the future.

If You Don’t Have a TouchPad and Already Own neato!:

Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do to make this right. I could list a lot of possible alternatives, but they’d all be promises that I can’t promise I’d keep. I feel terrible about the fact that there will be some donors that got nothing more than their name in an app they can’t use. 

I accept full blame for that, though, the reason the Mojo/Phone app is getting put on the backburner is absolutely because of the uncertainty of the webOS platform. Mojo-built apps were already on their way out the door as Enyo was being billed as the next big thing, but with pretty much all hopes of Enyo not coming to legacy devices like the Pre and Pre 2, the effort to get the Mojo app in a usable state seems futile.

There is a chance, however, that since the Phone app is like 80% completed, I may wrap it up one day and release it as is, with no extra features that the TouchPad version has, but a usable multi-network stream and the ability to post to multiple networks at once, the core features of incredible! which already mostly work in the Mojo app. If I do do this, it will be released to all donors for free, and I’d severely discount the price of the app for the phone.

UPDATE! James Harris, developer of FlashCards, has graciously volunteered to offer donors that don’t have a TouchPad and already have neato! a Promo Code for FlashCards! This is a great app and is another choice you have!

So, What Now?
Now, I take a little time to chill out. I’ve been on this app for well over a year now and it feels good to have it “released”. I’ll probably push a small update to neato! out to fix a bug with pairing your phone and your TouchPad together. I also have two new app ideas, but I want to see how the webOS climate changes before I even begin those apps. One will probably one day turn up on some platform, probably PhoneGapped.

So, enjoy incredible! and be on the look out for that email from me!