About a year ago today I was holiday visiting my family in Montana. I had a lot of work to do but as usual was distracted by reddit.
I wasn't distracted by the content on reddit, as I usually am, but got it into my head that I should write new client for iPad. At the time, Alien Blue HD (iPad version) did not exist, and I wanted a client. I got started and had some neat ideas, made some progress and had a moderately useful app in a few days.
A year goes by.
Today as I am going through an old laptop looking for some totally unrelated code, I happen across the Readdit source. Holy shit! It's that reddit client I was writing a year ago and completely forgot a few months later when I decided to be a startup guy and start Ficture. So I fire up Xcode and compile it and holy shit again it totally works, and I forgot how much progress I had made.
There is no way that I have enough time to finish writing the client all by myself. It needs about 2x as much work as I already put in to it to finish it. The plan originally was to release the app for a few bucks on the app store. Instead, today, I am open sourcing the whole thing and offering to act as the maintainer and BDFL of the project.
Here's the deal. I am releasing the source today and creating a subreddit to coordinate the development. I will merge pull requests, help out with the design and offer my experience as an iOS app developer since before there was an App Store. I'll even get my hands dirty in code, and help people out with the source via the subreddit.
When the app is in a finished enough state, I will foot the bill for the App Store account and release the app for free. I've authored a few successful apps before. I think we can do this.
So here it is:
https://github.com/samuraisam/readdit
And here is the subreddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/readditapp/
TL;DR I wrote a iPad reddit client a year ago and am open sourcing it today in the hopes that the community will pick up the development so we can have our very own community-created beautiful iPad app.