Well, so much for staying “low-key” with a Ground Control Forum. John Casasanta, the Development Manager at My Dream App and of iClip fame, has let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” by submitting the forum to digg (digg it here). I have “punished” John for this “oversight” (I said in my original email that it was “low-key” for now!) by asking him to contribute to the forums which he has most penitently done. Thanks John!

Now the invitation is open to all to come and check out what’s going on in the Ground Control Forums. It seems that there is still definite interest to keep GC alive by some of the Mac programming community with some pretty impressive coding chops. What becomes of all this is still up in the air, but the GC Forum is the best place to stay on top of all things GC and help contribute to the ongoing development of Ground Control.

I was originally planning on inviting only a select few, so that we could bat around the issues of continuing development of GC apart from MDA and then after getting enough feedback, gauge the interest and decide whether to make a public announcement or not. Well, that process has been “slightly” accelerated thanks to John. In light of that, please go easy on the design of the site as I was also planning on using this period to tweak and fine-tune little things here and there. I am open to feedback, so feel free to come in and post any suggestions for improvement on the forums, and I’ll try to keep tweaking it as we go.

I will be posting major GC news updates to this blog for the RSS blast, so definitely keep the RSS feed bookmarked. Also, I will still be contributing to the MDA forums as development on the three winners proceeds. So I look forward to seeing what all comes together over the course of the next several months.

Long live Ground Control!

I just have to say that today has been one crazy day. I’m writing this before the final results are in, so it’s still up in the air what the final outcome will be. I can’t imagine being in Kevin, Farzad and Michael’s shoes right now. Total shades of 2000 and ‘04. It really is too bad that someone has to lose and that not every idea is “pick-up-able” by other developers as was once hoped.

Where I might be wrong is the fact that three ideas are duking it out to a bloody pulp and if that doesn’t signal passionate interest to a potential developer I don’t know what would.

So far, it looks like it has been a pretty clean fight and it has been an interesting dynamic not knowing exactly who was what color. I will wait until the dust starts settling and the blood coagulating and then give some final thoughts on this round of voting. All I can say is craziness. But good craziness.

Howdy folks. Most of you are probably coming here from the My Dream App contest site. As you’re also probably aware, Ground Control was eliminated in the semi-final round and is now out of the running. I went ahead and set up this blog to keep those that are interested in whatever happens to Ground Control abreast of the news. If there is continued interest, I am thinking about putting up a BB for users to banter back and forth and continue the development of ideas. For now, I’m playing catch-up on other projects and will be posting as time permits.

I do want to thank everyone at MDA, including Phil and the staff, the other contestants and especially the community that caught hold of the Ground Control vision. I had a blast and am honored that my idea was able to make it to #7 out of over 2700 other entries. Truly amazing.

It will be impossible for me to keep it alive without your interest and support. I look forward to see what the upcoming weeks and months have in store.