Hal Mueller (@halm), local Cocoa/Mac/iPhone instructor and one of the long time local Xcoders, responded to an email that I’ve seen or heard a dozen times before – the gist being, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, and I need a developer to help me make it real… anyone willing to donate their time?”

Hal’s response to the Xcoder mailing list was so incredibly well stated that I’m going to completely steal it and put up the response here. By “the group”, he’s speaking of the Seattle Xcoders:

Your best bet is to attend some meetings and get to know some people. The group has been very supportive of new ventures and new developers. But I don’t know any decent Cocoa developer who’s sitting around thinking “oh if only I had a project concept”. You will have some selling to do.

The risk in these “rev share” deals seems to me to fall mostly on the developer, particularly as an opportunity cost, since it amounts to an interest-free loan, to the business, of the value of that developer’s time. Ideas are easy; I have a notebook full of them (and if the value of your idea goes to zero as soon as someone else hears of it, there’s really no barrier to competitors). If I’m going to take on a partner I want to see a proven record in the business side: marketing, sales, management, fundraising. I want to see a complementary skill set with a dollar value comparable to what I would be putting into the venture.

well, really it’s remote python through a web browser, but it’s still pretty cool. I caught these two links from an email that Brian Dorsey wrote, and thought they were worth putting up on the blog for later reference (thanks Google!)

http://try-python.mired.org/

Try-Python is a classic interactive python 2.5.2 (as of this writing) interpreter, so available through some javascript magic and running in what looks like a console window. For those little “How’s python do this again…” things, it’s amazingly quick. Okay – so I normally find it just as quick to pop open a terminal, but if I didn’t have a terminal available… this would be invaluable.

http://con.appspot.com/console/

Similar to try-python, but made with a very different intent – it’s meant to plug into Google AppEngine (they’ve made the source available at git://proven-corporation.com/app-engine-console/). Can’t beat that! Functionally, it’s pretty much the same as Try-Python except that it makes you log in first – which I can’t really complain about – if I were running an open interpreter like that I’d likely want to know who was doing what… or otherwise force a means of “cleaning” that system periodically.

The whole thread popped up on the local Seattle Python mailing list because Katherine Hernandez was interesting in poking at python, but was primarily working from an iPod (and soon, I think, an iPad) – where an interactive terminal is discouraged if not denied.

That denial means you can’t sell anything like that through the AppStore, but I’m beginning to wonder if I couldn’t knock together a python interpreter and the standard libraries as a development-only thing, and then make that available. Anyone with a dev license could compile and run it, and share it with a number of folks using the ad-hoc distribution model. It’s the only immediate work-around I can think to the AppStore controlled model, but it might do the trick.

Of course, I need another new project like I need a hole in my head, but it’s a neat idea…