ironcoder

Our next Iron Coder is none other than schwatoo, with his SpaceCam application.

This is an app like the new Leopard iChat where you can put yourself into any background. Major new feature implemented in a weekend, and I’m very impressed. There’s even custom kernel code in there which makes schwatoo’s entry even more studly. Plus it let me have theFLOATING HEAD. BOOGA BOOGA

The next four runner-up entries are:

1. Andrew Wellington with Space Board. Awarded best use of undocumented goodness.
2. Conor Dearden with Desk Space. The Most Potentially Useful. Plus it’s all set to be a Leopard-style UI.
3. John Labovitz with ImageStage. I don’t know why, but I really like this one. It’s my favorite of all of the “go fetch an image from somewhere and display it”. Plus I’m a sucker for radar screens.
4. Chris Parrish, with Star Tracer. Awarded most beautiful icon and display. Behold The Star Pumpkin.

And many thanks for the rest of the ironcoders. I had a lot of fun going through the entries and pawing through the code. Here they are, sorted by first name:

• Blake Seely with Invader. Best use of goatse.cx imagery. (to clarify, the goatse.cx imagery is my own take on it – it’s SFW, and SFLunch too)
• Colin Gavin with Space@Night. This one is very pretty. I think it’d make a good screen saver too. Be sure to use the status item to tweak the parameters.
• Erik Wrenholt with MyFaces, a mySpace image viewer. Luckily it comes with a disclaimer. “my eyes! they burn!”. Has cool transitions.
• Geoffrey Schmit with Space Defender. Has a beautiful background, and a nice super-nova effect when losing.
• Henry Skelton with Free Spaceball. Another in the “actually kind of useful” category. I’m looking forward to compiling Big Stuff and seeing my memory go down.
• Jason Terhorst with SpaceViewer. Educational, and with gratuitous special effects!
• Lucas Eckels, with Close. This was the most entertaining one for me, since it tugs at my nostalgia for Daleks on the original 128K Mac. Be sure to play this all the way through the bonus round. Also has the most entertaining plist : “deadFoeImage = whopoo”
• zbir with Bokeh. Best improvement of the judge’s vocabulary, with new words like “Bokeh” and “Interstice”

Cashing in on the Prizes

Please email me (chairman@ironcoder.org) your top choices for prizes – put IronCoder in the subject so my spam filter doesn’t eat it up. I’ll go down the list of the top five, and the draw a lottery for the runners-up and arrange for the prizes to get to you.

The Entries

You can download all the entries in one giant disk image (well 10MB) here: ironcoder_4.dmg

Hi Iron Coders,

Thanks to Schwatoo and lexx, we now have a spiffy Upload Form. Make sure your entry has completed uploading before the deadline – 5 pm Central time on Sunday.

Please please please include a README file that includes your name, anything interesting or spectacular about your entry, as well as any install or uninstall instructions or special requirements.

The API and Theme this time around is:

Core Image + Space

Deadline: 5pm Central Time Sunday October 29. We’ll post to ironcoder.org some deatils on uploading your submissions.

Mac OS X 10.4.X – sorry no Leopard this time.

Space can be office, desk, disk, trading, hyper, outer, inner, or whatever kind of space you can think of.

You can pick up the sample program, Unicorn Space, uses a unicorn picture for ” ” in a string, moving a bump distortion over the image randomly. Really silly and pointless.

Be sure to check out the samples incldued with Xcode 2.3 – They live in the Quartz directory of /Developer/Examples. The Fun House sample is useful for figuring out what the parameters to specific CI filters actually do.

Some useful links:

• Developing with Core Image
• Introduction to Core Image Programming Guide
• Core Image Filter Reference
• Core Image Reference Collection

Using Quartz Composer is OK, but you must have at least one Objective-C source file with at least one CI-prefixed call. This is a coder’s competition, after all. The prohibition against running in someone else’s address space is lifted, so if you wanted to write some kind of QC plugin, go ahead.

Woot! Iron Coder 4 is this weekend! Like last time, it will start on Friday, 5pm Central US time. The API and theme will be posted here then. The submission deadline is 5pm Central time on Sunday, and then live judging will happen in the #macsb IRC channel. The rules are pretty much unchanged from last time. And remember, if you win, you get to run IronCoder 5 in the Winter.

We have prizes this time around again, such as a bunch of cool stuff from the fine folks at Griffin Technology, including Two (yes two!) RadioSharks, an AirClick USB, PowerMate, and an iTrip Auto. I’m pimping my own warez by providing an autographed copy of Advanced Mac OS X Programming for the winner, as well as some Learn Objective C on the Macintosh ebooks from Spiderworks. The groovy folks at Zutubi have provided a Pulse Standard Edition license.

Also, Daniel Jalkut is contributing The Red Sweater Bundle, one each of FlexTime, FastScripts, and Clarion. And last Iron Coder judge Gus Mueller of Flying Meat fame is throwing in a copy of VoodooPad, FlySketch, and FlyGesture.

Hope to see you on Friday.