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The Netherlands based startup Danger Cove makes apps with aim to improve productivity, make technology accessible and bring joy to everyone who uses them. Boy van Amstel is Founder and developer of all great apps coming from Danger Cove factory.
Q: Could you tell us something more about Danger Cove?
A: Danger Cove was founded in October of 2011, by a friend of mine and myself. The company name was inspired by a particular 90s point-and-click adventure game that we both like. Our goal was to design, create and sell our own products. I had been a freelance web designer and developer since highschool and we both worked at an internet agency at the time. We’d lost interest in working on client projects and felt that we could accomplish more (and have more fun) by exploring some of our own ideas.
We released three apps together, but eventually had a different vision of how Danger Cove should evolve and we split in April of 2013. I continued Danger Cove and have been focusing fully on apps for Apple devices since then, Macs primarily.
Danger Cove currently offers four completed apps: Porthole, AirVLC, Reign and coucou. One is in public beta: Tapetrap and another two are in progress: Paperstage and Toggluv.
Q: What is your most successful project/app until now?
A: There are various ways to define successful, but I think overall Porthole is my favorite app. I use it daily. Porthole allows you to stream all audio from your Mac to multiple AirPlay speakers. It works on any 64-bit Mac running OS X 10.6 or higher.
I started working on it after I couldn’t find a straight forward, easy to use Mac app that would allow me to stream Spotify to an AirPlay Express. It took about eight weeks to release the first version, which was quite limited compared to what Porthole can do now.
It came out around March of 2012, right when Spotify was expanding its service to additional countries. Porthole was featured on Lifehacker and a number of other great sites, which definitely helped spread the word.
Apple has implemented new AirPlay features in iOS and OS X over the last two years, but they still lack Porthole’s flexibility and support for multiple speaker setups.
Q: Where do you find inspiration for your projects?
A: Sometimes I come across something that doesn’t work the way I’d like it to, which inspires me to come up with an alternative. Other times some new technology, SDK or whatever comes out and after playing around with it I think of something to build for it.
Most of these projects end up in a folder called ‘Shelved’ though ;).
Q: Do you work alone or do you have team helping you?
A: I mostly work alone, but for my two latest projects (Paperstage and Toggluv) I’m collaborating with my friend Ruurd. Our tasks overlap, but generally Ruurd focuses more on design and the websites, while I work on coding the apps.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: I’ve been working on three new projects:
Tapetrap has been in public beta for a while now. It allows you to subscribe to online video websites, like: TED, YouTube, Vimeo and any other site with an RSS feed. Then it keeps track of which videos you’ve watched. I love it, but it hasn’t really taken off yet. I’m having a hard time reaching the target audience.
Paperstage is an app for designers and aims to make it much easier to browse CSS gallery sites. It’s been well received and Ruurd and I have been in contact with quite a few people about it. After testing a private beta version, we’re now working on a new release.
Toggluv is a prettier Mac client for Toggl’s time tracking service. I always keep records of what I work on and for how long. Recently I switched to Toggl to do this, which has been great, only their Mac app isn’t as wonderful as their web service. This inspired me to collaborate with Ruurd on a new, prettier version.
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