ironcoder

Ironcoder 7 has been and gone. Friend of Ironcoder, Jeff Smykil over at Ars Technica has posted a nice write up about some of entries.

The winner this time around is “Etcher” by Geoff Pado. Etch is a virtual etch-a-sketch for Mac OS X. The voting was very close, with Etcher winning by a mere 1 vote over its competition.

I’m sending Geoff his prize of an 8GB iPod Touch (kindly donated to Ironcoder by Brain Murmurs the makers of mentat: Project Management Rebooted, and apparently it will be replacing Geoff’s old iPod Shuffle.

You can read about, see the voting and download all the other entries from the new ironcoder contest site.

Ironcoder 7 was a major change in the way Ironcoder is managed.

• Instead of lots of small donated prizes, we had a single big prize.

• Instead of previous winner judging the contest we had the contestants vote amongst themselves to chose the winner.

• Instead of managing voting, entries and prizes by hand we used a new website to manage all this.

• Instead of focusing on one weekend for the contest we spread the contest out over just over a week.

Some of these changes were for the good. The new contest.ironcoder.org is a great start, but needs a lot of work and some tweaking. And the sponsored prize this time was great. The community voting definitely worked, and I think that will stay, although perhaps we’ll open the vote up to anywhere (with contestants perhaps getting more votes). The longer duration Ironcoder is a tough one and I think Ironoder may be returning to the single weekend format.

If you have any feedback on Ironcoder please email, or use the ironcoder blog comments.

A big thank you to everyone taking part and Mentat for the donated prize.

Update: A disk image containing all projects (source and executable) is available from the Google code server. Individual projects are available as well.

Please use the new Ironcoder Contest website at: http://contest.ironcoder.org:8080 to submit your entries.

We are extending the deadline for uploads for another day, and voting will start on November 19th.

The contest website is very rough and ready and please use the support form (or email ironcoder7@ironcoder.org) to report any issues.

At the moment you’ll need to host your submission yourself. But upload functionality will be added later this evening.

API: Core Animation (or LayerKit if you prefer)

Theme: Retro

Deadline is 9PM CST on Sunday 18th November. Judging and voting will take place in Twitter via @ironcoder.

Please make sure you check ironcoder.org frequently, details about submissions and voting will be posted later this week.

For more, join: #ironcoder on freenode.net

Next weekend Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch is hosting the second C4 conference. On the Sunday there will be a special Live Ironcoder contest! Some of the former winners, organisers and contestants will be in attendance. Ironcoder will continue as normal after C4.

Update: Jonathan has updated the C4 website with information about the Sunday contest

Mac Developers using the SparklePlus auto-update framework in their applications should note that the project has moved to a new online home, at Google Code hosting. Previously the project was at ironcoder.org, but a number of factors (not least of which being trouble with the hosting provider) made Google seem like a better choice. The old SparklePlus mailing list has also been superseded by a Google group.

• SparklePlus home
• SparklePlus Google group

The project page includes some migration information for those of you who have been using SparklePlus already.

Sparkle, for those of you who might not know, is a cool Mac OS X framework that makes it easy to have applications check for updated versions, and then optionally download and install those updates. It was written by Andy Matuschak. SparklePlus expands on Sparkle by adding anonymous system information with the update checks– things like what version of Mac OS X the software is running on, and how much RAM is available. That kind of information is useful to developers when they’re trying to figure out what version(s) of Mac OS X (etc…) they need to support. Without it, a developer can only guess if any of their users are still running older versions of Mac OS X, and whether dropping support for a version is likely to cause trouble for people.

The Adium team has a nice example of what can be done with this information at their Sparkle+ stats page.

Prizes allocations are taking a little bit longer than anticipated. It turns out that allocating prizes fairly according to preference, while making sure everyone gets more than zero prizes is tough. And unfortunately I don’t have many cycles to spare. Next time we’ll automate the entire process. But for now please bear with me.

Prizes for Ironcoder V are being allocated. Contestants should have received an email from me with the details. If you took part in Ironcoder V and did not receive an email please contact me at chairman at ironcoder _dot org.

Congratulations winners.

The Winner of Ironcoder V is Ben Gottlieb with his “WikiPath” Wikipedia screensaver. This screen saver followed random paths through Wikipedia, display each page in a tile on the screen. The code was really well written with some neat tricks that kept the code simple.

Runners Up:

Blurred Life - Adam Leonard A great game/screensaver combo. Try and guess if a blurred image downloaded from Flickr is about life or not-life.

CrepuscularLife - Josh Freeman A really fast and energetic Conway’s Game of Life screensaver.

LifeLike - Ian Gowen Another Conway Game of Life screensaver, used a really cool colour technique to add dynamic colour to cellular automatons.

Pixure - Joseph Wardell A strange screensaver that used genetic algorithsm to breed pixels.

Other notable entries:

Best Non-Screensaver: Viva - Daniel Jalkut

Most Complex Quartz Composer: Tree of Life - Chris Parrish

Only Non-Objective-C Entry: Life Saver - Chris Liscio

Most Amusing Source Code: S#!t Happens - Jim Turner & Kristie Turner

We’ve had 30 entries for Ironcoder V. That’s a fantastic turn out, the best yet. So far I’ve looked at 16 entries, and I’m going to stop there and finish the rest on Monday 2nd April. I’ll be in #macsb at 5PM CST on Monday to judge the remaining 14. Wish me luck. It isn’t going to be easy picking a winner.

All entries are available in a single disk image at: Ironcoder_5.dmg (15MB). And once again thanks to everyone who has taken part.

That’s it. Time’s up. Put down your text editors. Stop your compilers. Remind your family that you’re still alive.

All the entries have been copied to the test machine. If you haven’t uploaded already and have a really really good excuse why you missed the ever so important deadline please email the chairman.

I’ll be judging entries starting immediately, but it will take some time to get organised. All contestants will be informed by email (you did include your email address in your Readme) how their entry did. Prizes will be sorted out in the following week.

Join the live fun in the #macsb channel.