The Podcast Timer is an idea that came out from our podcasting sessions. We noticed that we all had a tendency to talk for long periods of time without knowing it. To help us keep track of this we envisioned an app that would allow the people participating in the podcast to indicate that they were talking, and help them know how long they were talking.
When Luther initially brought up the idea we were preparing for a podcast. This quickly lead to a brainstorming session around what we could accomplish with this app. We came up with the idea that we should show real time stats on how long a person had talked in relation to the other hosts. We also thought that it might get crouded if we were all trying to press a single iPad when we started talking, which lead us to think about using our individual phones as remotes, and the iPad serving as a server.
The last idea works well with some of the other apps that Effective Programming is working on because the both involve using an iOS device as a server.
The hope is that by the end of this app we will have both a great utility app, as well as a framework to help create server and client iOS apps.