TechStart, a non-profit organization founded by the Software Association of Oregon, launched their new website recently. TechStart’s mission is:
To promote technology education to strengthen the teamwork, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills of K-12 students and, in so doing, awaken a passion for technology among all Oregon students.
I had the pleasure of working with President Chris Brooks and his team to develop TechStart’s new website. Working with non-profit organizations is personally gratifying; my frequent non-profit projects are one of many reasons why I love working at Concentric Sky. I’m particularly happy to work with TechStart, and hope that the next generation of students will benefit from an early introduction to math and science as much as I have.
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I’ve always loved the Astronomy Picture Of The Day - so when the opportunity arose to collaborate with the APOD team, I jumped at it.
Bringing APOD to the iPhone had some challenges. Many APOD images are quite large, so we developed our own Objective C libraries to allow them to be quickly scaled up and down using only the iPhone’s limited processing power.
APOD frequently includes detailed descriptions along with its pictures, however our focus with the app was the beauty of the pictures themselves. This led us to create a relatively lightweight interface that gives the picture the most screen real estate possible. A user can explore the pictures - either in sequence or by jumping to the posting date. Pictures can be saved to the phone or shared with friends via email links. We also provided the ability to clear the image cache in case the user gets carried away.
We built APOD for the iPhone as a free app, supported by ads from Admob. Yes, we know ads take up valuable screen real estate. That’s a good point. But it’s a complex trade off: We want to build free apps, but we need to cover costs. We could charge for the app, but that would take unfair advantage of the many photographers that have allowed APOD to post their copyrighted pictures over the years.
The middle ground we’ve chosen is this - The app is free. Copyrighted images don’t display ads, but instead link back to the photographer’s credit on APOD. All other images display ads and 50% of the proceeds are donated back to the APOD project to support their awesome work. We feel pretty good about this arrangement and hope you will too. Enjoy the app!
If you’re an iPhone user, you can click this link to download the app: 
For everyone else, I invite you to visit our APOD Product page.
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