Under the Bridge

As you may have noted previously, the artistic skills are not ones of noted accomplishment by trolls. (Aside, that is, from performance art. We’re real good at that, as pretty much anyone who’s met us will attest, we trust.) So we were pleased as punch to stumble across this cleverly named site with a set of nice-looking free UIToolbar/UITabBar icons! We’ll download those immediately, yes…

But wait, what’s this over on the side?

a “kickstart”? What is a “kickstart”? Well, it turns out that Kickstarter.com is

Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers…

Now that’s intriguing, isn’t it? Here’s the details, but the basic upshot is it’s a website for organizing pledge drives. If enough people sign up to reach the pledge amount, everyone pays their pledge, if not, no one does. An interesting concept, and certainly looks like it has more potential than a donationware model.

So the designer fellow has a project page there where he offers rewards for various levels of pledging, starting with

I make cool icons for iPhone developers at http://glyphish.com and if I can collect $500 in donations, I’ll release the whole set of icons in vector format (SVG + Illustrator) for use in apps, posters, tshirts, whatever!

And that has worked out pretty well for him; it was up to $685 when we arrived, and hey we did think the icons were pretty nice and we were curious to try this Kickstart thing out besides, so we kicked in $20 to see how it went. Which was smoothly. So the nifty idea here appears to be implemented competently, which is always a nice bonus.

So, that certainly is an interesting alternative to consider for funding your development … or anything else … isn’t it? There’s a wide variety of different kinds of projects to explore, but we note with particular interest this project to accumulate enough pledges to remove ads from this iGoozex app. Which, well, we have no use for ourselves, but we’ll certainly be checking back to see how that works out for this fellow with people who do, and if it looks like this concept has some hope of working for developers as well as artists, we’ll see about trying this idea out for some project of our own perhaps. It certainly would be a nifty way of prejudging actual user interest in an application concept!