For two months a staggering number of developers, scattered all over the earth, have been toiling away at the second Force.com Developer Challenge! The challenge was simple and open-ended: building it on Force.com, learn, and have fun. There was also mention of a MacBook Pro and other goodies, which seems to have provided an incentive! Five of us pored over the many good entries and filtered down to the 80 valid entries looking for that little something that excited us – we looked for style, for technical ability, for pizzaz, and that little x-factor.

So without further ado, here are the top three outstanding submissions:

• The Cookbook, by Wes Nolte, gets the MacBook Pro! It's novel, provides interesting search, keywording, ranking and relatedness features, has a great clean UI, integrates print and reCAPTCHA, and much more.
  

  

• Appiphony Relay's blogging engine by Les Kismartoni boasts a number of features including multiple author blogging, multiple profiles/users, advanced WYSIWYG editing, CAPTCHA, Email-to-Post, and more, gets the runner up iPod Touch!

  

• enduranceAthlete from Tim Inman also gets an iPod Touch for their solution to planning, tracking and analysing workouts, complete with video overviews.

  

Seven runners up (in no particular order) will all be receiving iPod Nanos:

• Curtis Christensen
• Yogesh Rankawat
• Ritesh Gupta
• Jason Venable
• Jim Prothe
• Dmitri Sennikov
• Killian McHale

Honorary mentions go to Antoine Jean-Luc, Kiran Padiyar, Jonathan Rico, Jambird, Abhinav Gupta, Peter Gascoyne.

For sheer exuberance, John Rotenstein and David Schach deserve a mention for their Daily Shinro game!

T-shirts and our heartfelt thanks to the rest of you! I hope some of you can join us at the hackathon during Dreamforce.