The fact that his visually stunning and interesting app Percolator was a staff pick in the App Store (at one point, I bought nearly all staff picks near automatically) is relevant. I wish he had talked more about the week he spent working on the app (how long did he work, how does he balance visual and technical tasks, his mentors, his weaknesses, the creative process, reuse of clever graphics routines, any backtracking). Perhaps a future blog post?

I remain convinced that Apple has a watchlist of great app makers and apps (e.g. a reviewer that finds an Apple worthy app can flag it to the editors as worthy of consideration).

And, Percolator and Tinrocket were rightly on that list.