I really like being a part of the Indie Mac Developer Community, and I try to participate whenever there is some group event, whether it be donating licenses to charity events (like the PMC Software Charity Fundraiser), participating in group sales (like MacSanta from a couple of of years ago), changing my twitter avatar to the latest trend, and so forth.
I started my own idea way back at WWDC, earlier this year. Although everybody I spoke to thought it was a cool idea, it took a long time to get my idea implemented (since it required writing some code) and then even longer to get it going across the community. Unfortunately, due to a combination of timing and some bugs of Apple's, my idea — which happened on Halloween — mostly went <thud> like a tree falling in the forest when nobody's around.
The idea was to get as many indie developers to insert a bit of code, and some artwork, into their application, and have it released before Halloween. Then, simultaneously, Snow Leopard users would notice that a lot of their apps — at least those that were from participating indie companies — had special Halloween icons.
So really this was just something to do for fun, even though getting something like this noticed would be good for marketing too. Mostly it was just for fun though. :-)
Unfortunately, this was using bleeding-edge technology, and the DockTile plugin architecture in Snow Leopard that allows an application to update its dock icon even while the app is not running had, shall we say, a few kinks to work out. So it took months (and a DTS incident) to figure out enough to get it working — at least, sort of.
Any any case, we and several companies managed to jump in, in spite of the short notice. (The real need for a longer notice is to prepare the artwork!) But I think that with Halloween falling on a Saturday, and the fact that for many installations, the dock tile plugin is broken), not enough people noticed it.
We're going to try again with a fun, secular holiday or two next year. Drop me a line if you want to get involved. And maybe more people will notice next time!
