I know I'm a bit late in responding here but hey can't be checking the thread every two minutes, I'm busy developing for the contest!

Anyways, in response to:
As the lead developer on Flip, just wanted to point out that while the project "officially" started in 2008, it's been a LONG road since then and there was a lot of downtime in between. Ciro had officially started it, built some of it up in python... then I got on board, helped him out for a few months and got some actual functionality going on... then we left it alone for about 8-10 months (the old "get it working so it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and call it "done enough for me" mentality!). Then we started to rebuild the entire project from scratch in C to make it more stable/reliable/faster... which took many months... everything got changed around, new features, different way of doing things, etc. Big long wish list of things came up, of which we had maybe 30% done... then the N900 came out, and a whole whack of things didn't work so I basically gave up on it for a few months. Finally in the last two months I got Spenc3 on board to help with the N900 specific code, and we've been doing a lot of backend playing around, but not actual updates/major changes.

This competition is acting as motivation to help us take that "playing around' and apply it to make an "end user ready" application. Whether that counts as being good enough to be worth a bounty or not, that's up to the community ppl to decide, but in my mind it makes perfect sense for the goal of this contest which was to get more apps out there for N900 users. Getting new developers onboard is awesome too, but I think the content should be helping to push both goals.

(And you know, competition or not... if anyone including "the direct competitors" need some coding help or API assistance/etc... especially with that ellusive AlarmD interface... we're more than happy to share what we know and help out! The whole point isn't to get the reward, it's to help build the devel community!)

And one more point... Spenc3 and I are working on a few different apps, so yea we might have a bit more coding background/experience, but we're also trying to help push more apps out there because of it!