In his recent post Screens on Screen, Andy Baio says

… stop hiding your imperfect and incomplete ideas for years. Stop collecting them in your head, like dying butterflies in a glass jar. It’s always better to let them fly.

It occurred to me that I have a number of stalled projects, sitting in private repositories, that I will almost certainly never ship. After reading Andy’s post, I have decided to move some of them to public github repositories. I’m not sure who it will benefit, but that’s really not the point, is it? Aside from the experience gained from starting the projects, I’m certainly not benefiting from them. Perhaps, though, some fresh developer will find them and learn a bit about how (or how not!) to do some things.

The first such project is Lil Jukebox, an app that allows young kids to listen to a selection of music chosen by their parents. While I normally prefer to target the most recent versions of iOS, I initially set this project up to target iOS 3.1. The idea was that parents could install it on old 1st generation iPods which were sitting in drawers gathering dust. While I eventually gave up on that (because iOS 3.1 - really, ugh! and it didn’t appear Apple would approve of an app supporting both iOS 3.1 and the then-new iPhone 5), I think that decision is reflected a bit in the code.

There are a few more, and will likely be several in the future. I will try to continue to follow Andy’s suggestion and, rather than letting such projects die like butterflies in a glass jar, I’ll let them fly.