Mutant Soup was the name of a drawing I did several years ago in a Freehand Drawing class in college. Here’s a snapshot of it that I took on a circa 1999 digital camera (not even 1 megapixel). One day I’ll take it back out and use my 10MP DSLR. I always thought it was a funny and unique name, perfect for a software company or rock band. It is in fact the name of my band in the game Rock Band. The face is modeled after Eric Idle from Monty Python.

Hamster Soup is an iPhone app that provides up-to-date, at-a-glance information about what is going on in the Big Brother USA house. Hamster Soup 3.0 documents the current season of Big Brother USA, Big Brother 13. Hamster Soup provides a daily summary, “The Daily Dish,” live feed updates from JokersUpdates.com, Hamster Bios, and an Alumni Alley of Big Brother contestants from seasons past.

Big Brother USA houseguests have been called hamsters for several years now, as a reference to “hamsters in a cage”. Google “Big Brother hamster” and see.

MutantSoup* writes The Daily Dish and maintains the Hamster Bios so that they show the current status of each houseguest and document important events in each hamster’s life in the game. Live feed watchers at JokersUpdates.com write the Live Updates as they happen in real-time. There are always people watching the feeds, so coverage is nearly 24/7, except when the hamsters are sleeping. Sometimes even then, as feed watchers will let you know who snores too loud, who is restless, who gets up during the night to run to the restroom (and if they come back without washing their hands!) and especially any late-night hookups.

Special thanks to Jokerette of the excellent JokersUpdates website for allowing me to broadcast their live update feed!

* MutantSoup is actually a one-man operation.

MutantSoup will update The Daily Dish and Hamster Bios daily for the duration of the Big Brother season. Live feed watchers also write for the duration of the game. During the off-season, the Alumni Alley will be updated occasionally, but more frequently as the next season approaches.

Hamster Soup loads current data each time you run it, but after that you will need to simply pull down at the top to refresh. It does make use of Apple’s Push Notification Service, mainly to notify users who opt to receive updates of major events in the house. Major events include evictions, results of Head of Household competitions, Veto winners, and even monumental, game-changing fights.

This also means that during live television shows, there will be several notifications as things happen. If you aren’t watching the show at the time and don’t want to know what happens, these notifications can act as spoilers! Plan accordingly and turn off notifications if you do not wish to receive them. This is currently accomplished in the Settings app, in the Notifications category. Find Hamster Soup in the list and turn Alerts Off.

Only 1.99 cents. Cheaper than the price of a cappuccino at Starbucks, or even McDonald’s.

Sorry, no. Big Brother Hamster Soup is a huge, time-consuming task. I strive to create new features every season, and the amount of time involved with design and coding is significant. On top of that, there is writing content like Daily Dish for nearly every day of a 3 month season, making sure Live Updates are updating, and making sure bios and other content are up to date. This is in addition to life, my 8-5 day job, family, and everything else, including web site costs. $1.99 a year is a reasonable price to ask for so much.

The 2011 Hamster Soup had In-App Purchase of season 13 ready to go, but at the last minute I pulled the feature back out. There were two main reasons.

First, even though it had been working perfectly on Apple’s test servers for weeks, right before it was time to submit Hamster Soup to the App Store to be ready for premiere night, the In-App Purchase servers got flaky and it didn’t work every time. For a time-sensitive app like this, it became a big concern. Imagine having tons of fans on premiere night being unable to add the new season. It would have been a nightmare!

Second, it was around the time that the patent troll Lodsys began sending legal notices to random developers over In-App Purchases of upgrades and features. The threat of getting potentially sued out of the blue was just too much, and a problem I could easily avoid.

If the risks are gone when season 14 rolls around, the feature may return.

An Android Market version and Amazon Appstore version of Hamster Soup has been considered, but at the moment is not being planned. The two main reasons why I remain hesitant to develop a version that runs on Android devices are that it is difficult to properly support every single variation of Android device out there, and the onerous terms of the Amazon app store contract. As a small developer, I simply can’t afford to have many thousands of free or heavily discounted apps from Amazon putting a heavy load on the servers and making the experience poor for everyone else.