It’s pretty easy to let routine take over. No shame in that, everyone gives in. This weekend we popped out of the same old, same old and decided to build something new - sure, there was a motive (Rails Rumble 2008), but we just took it as an excuse. In 48 hours (well, we slept two full nights, so make that about 24) we sketched, built and privately launched a new product called Melee.

If you do agile work (design or develoment), you probably do the stuff Melee helps you with, but with sticky notes and office walls. Melee is an agile brainstorming app. What does that mean, you ask? Let me give you a couple of use cases.

1) You’re a design and development shop who just got a RFP for a new social network. You might brainstorm a few ideas, throw them at the wall, cluster them, prioritize them, and build a proposal. Melee is your new wall.

2) You’re a development shop that uses SCRUM (ed: if you don’t use it yet, give it a try, you’ll love it). You maintain a product backlog which is a list of things to do, ordered by priority, and before each sprint, you look at the backlog, decide what to do next, and proceed to be awesome for the whole sprint. Melee helps you maintain the backlog.

It’s meant to be used either locally or over the web, so it should be a great tool to dump, cluster and prioritize ideas on those product planning conference calls you all do (we know we do them, at least). It’s all Ajax-based so you see live what others are doing, and they see what you are doing too. The goal is live collaboration.

Anyway, it’s easier to see it rather than reading about it, but since we’re not completely ready to show this baby to you yet, how about a Flickr set with screenshots and photos of the development process? Fine, you say? Well here, then.

Launch details

Melee will hopefully launch as a beta later this week - we’re doing all sorts of work with Totspot and Goplan 2.0 but we *will* get this out to you. Here’s what we can tell you already: there will likely be a free version and a paid version to help with our costs of running the app. In the beginning, it’ll be free for all, anyway. We do hope it’s useful for you and your team. It’s useful for ours - heck, otherwise, we wouldn’t build it. More details really soon, promise. Did I mention that Flickr set already?

Look, I get overly exceited about stuff - sometimes that’s unwarranted, other times, it totally is. I believe this is a good reason to be at the edge of my seat: Intel showed off a prototype of a handheld - based on their Moorestown platform - today at the Intel Developer Forum. And I’m drooling. Here’s why:

I have an iPhone and I love it. I love how it looks, how it feels, the possibilities it has as a platform, the whole experience. But now I want this. Sure, the form factor may be weird because it’s tall/wide, but if the tilt experience is as good as on the next few videos, I’m hooked.

Now obviously these are marketing videos, and a device like this is only as good as the combination of hardware and software it uses. But for now you’ve got my attention, Intel. Where do I sign? For those of you looking for more information, check out Intel’s press release or Boing Boing Gadgets, who are running an article on the prototype as well.

… and exhale. Apple finally cut the leash it had on developers since the iPhone SDK was released. At this point it doesn’t really matter if it was done to please developers or to get ready for the competition from Android (which is completely open). I’m betting on a little bit of both, but I admit I’m happy about finally being able to read and write about working with the SDK.

The full message to developers is quoted below:

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Now maybe Pragmatic Programmers will be able to release their upcoming book on iPhone development, and more authors will feel free to write about building apps and services on top of the iPhone platform. Me, I’m glad to see the blog posts with iPhone development knowledge roll in. It felt a little weird to finally have what I’ve been craving for so long and not being able to talk about it. Good times.

[Thanks to Chris Messina for the heads up on twitter]