Geo Rally for the iPhone

My side project, Durbinware, released our first iPhone app, Geo Rally, to Apple's App Store back in May. It allows users to create, share and challenge timed point-to-point treasure hunts. If you've seen the movies Rat Race, or Midnight Madness you'll understand the basic concept. The first point, or starting line, is revealed at the beginning of the challenge and then each consecutive waypoint requires users to solve text-based clues or riddles to proceed. Solving a clue and arriving at the next location triggers another clue and so on until the user arrives at the last point, or finish line. Different users can compete against the same course, or Rally, and the app will optionally tweet race completion times for bragging rights. It has the potential to facilitate a great team building experience among youth groups, friends or co-workers. If this MonoTouch based app sounds interesting to you then by all means please download it.

I had a great time working on Geo Rally and was very thankful for MonoTouch. Coming from a .NET background I was a little overwhelmed at the prospect of learning a new language (Objective C) and iOS's multitude of supporting core APIs. MonoTouch eliminated one of these roadblocks so I could hit the ground running in a familiar language and branch out into unknown APIs as needed. In the end I believe this made me more productive. And now, coupled with MonoDroid and Windows Phone 7, there are even more options for code reuse (everything but the UI). It's a good time to be a C# developer!