This is Will from howireallyfeel.org. Thanks for being so positive! :D

We didn’t make it anywhere near the final leaderboard… but hearing “everything I could want and more” from one of the judges is really lovely. Thank you. :)

I did Rakugoka – I think I made a large mistake by not working on the landing page sufficiently. I was just one guy though, compared to four on the lowdown app team.

Also – I didn’t get the exposure by being on the first teams page or blogging about making the app immediately after the competition like the lowdown guys did – lession learnt: marketing counts :).

Comments have been greatly appreciated though – it is good to get feedback. I’m keen to develop the app further after the rumble – I’m building it to be used by myself, and I’ll be interetested to see what the lowdown guys do. Two apps shows there is probably a general demand for this sort of app.

Thanks for this post. You were our first judge for our app, Diversion, and we were blown away by how insightful your comments were and actually in agreement with most of them. Thanks a lot for that; you’ve definitely lived up to your commitment to providing constructive feedback.

We were a bit dissappointed, though, because it seemed we were not able to get across the main strength of the app; you understood it as a ‘versioning system’ (nothing new), but that is just a feature of the app. The real power comes with the ability to work distributedly with documents, allowing other’s to “fork” (we called it divert) your documents and “merge” (we called it grab) other people’s changes into your own document (as you would do with code when working with Git). We wanted to bring to normal human beings the joy that Git brings to us as developers :-)

If you are interested on trying that side of the app, you can merge a couple of changes back into your document here, by clicking “Show” and “Grab” in the “future versions” of your document:

http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/users/38-Ben/documents/91/history

Just to be clear, I think we were lucky to have you as our judge and if you didn’t pick up that side of the app, it is a problem with our app!

Again thanks.
Jorge

I just wanted to write back and thank you for the constructive criticism on Yield the Floor. There were definitely deficiencies in the site as a whole, but I suppose most Rumble entries will have a few of those. I guess what made it most difficult for us was the lack of a designer on the team… a talent we’ll definitely work harder to recruit for next year. In addition, we have a number of notification mechanisms in the works that will turn the asynchronous nature of the site into a more seamless one.

Anyway, the last thing I want to do is seem like I’m making excuses for our work… that is definitely not the case. I’m proud what we did (especially the BDD nature of the code) and look forward to evolving the concept into a less staccato-like version soon.

Again, thanks for all your feedback!
:brad