ironcoder

Ironcoder 7 Aftermath

2007-11-24T16:23:14Z

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.

Ironcoder 7: Submissions

2007-11-18T23:04:36Z

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.

Ironcoder 7: Go!

2007-11-10T04:02:43Z

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

Ironcoder 7 Bigger, Better and Uncut

2007-11-02T19:09:35Z

Important Ironcoder 7 is now a week long. Ironcoder starts a week earlier on Friday 9th November and finishes on Sunday 18th November. That’s 9 full days of Ironcoding.

As if 216 hours of solid coding isn’t its own reward, Ironcoder 7 has an awesome prize for the winner:

First prize is an 8GB iPod Touch kindly donated to the cause by Brain Murmurs the makers of mentat: Project Management Rebooted

Ironcoder 7 will feature community based prize voting, but with the twist that only developers who submit an entry to the contest will be able to vote. The API and theme will be announced at 7PM CST on Friday 9th November. <spoiler>You should expect the API to be new to Leopard</spoiler>

Ironcoder 7

2007-11-02T18:43:52Z

Maybe the best way to get more interest in Ironcoder is to host another Ironcoder contest so…

~~Ironcoder 7 will be held on the weekend of 17th/18th November. Kick off will be at 7PM CST on Friday 16th November and judging will commence at 7PM CST on Sunday 18th November.~~

UPDATE: Ironcoder 7 is now a week long event. See the latest blog post for details!

We’ll be doing things a little bit differently this time. We’re still working out the details but we plan on having community based judging from now on. More details will be announced as they are finalised. Also, to celebrate the release of Leopard the theme and API will be chosen by the Ironcoder organisers.

Free your weekend and fine tune your compilers.

Ironcoder Repository

2007-10-25T01:23:55Z

Phillipe Casgrain has done an excellent of organising and categorising all of the Ironcoder source code. Source code for all entries of the first five Ironcoder contests is now online at the Ironcoder Google repository. Code for the Ironcoder 6 Live contest held at the C4 conference is being made available as it arrives.

Many thanks to Phillipe for the effort and to the Ironcoder entrants for writing the code in the first place.

In the Grim Future, there is only Ironcoder

2007-10-16T18:44:04Z

We’re due for another Ironcoder contest soon. The eCamm guys won the special Ironcoder/C4 event with their iPhone Video Conferencing application. With Leopard just around the corner we should be able to host a very interesting new contest.

But before a date for the next contest is chosen I’d like to ask the community for help with Ironcoder. I’ve been running Ironcoder pretty much on my own (with help from the usual suspects) but I need help. The last Ironcoder contest before C4 took a lot of time and effort to organise. Finding sponsors, judging, tallying scores, allocating prizes all took a long time. This was all amplified by the huge success of the contest.

So I need help. I’d like volunteers to help with some of the grunt work of running Ironcoder. There are a few things Ironcoder needs:

I think Ironcoder really needs some kind of automation put in place to help organise the sponsors, entrants and entries. I’m thinking a simple web-based system to allow users to register, create and edit sponsorships, upload entries, vote for entries, assign prizes, issue prizes and so on.

The Ironcoder automation system could be written in php or (ideally) Turbogears or even ROR, I don’t much care. The Ironcoder blog currently uses Wordpress, so some kind of Wordpress integration may be necessary (who knows, maybe there is one or more Wordpress plugins out there that Ironcoder could use).

I would like to some improvements made to the look of the blog. The standard Wordpress theme is incredibly boring. A custom theme (or just a really good looking pre-existing theme) would be great. While we’re at it I’d like to find people willing to maintain the blog and organise it a bit better and perhaps act as editors. I’d like to move away from using blog posts to announce contests, sponsors and entries and use a format more suited.

I’ve been trying to organise the previous contest entries in subversion on code.google.com I haven’t been able to finish this and some help would be appreciated.

Ironcoder has been very successful so far, but to continue being successful in the future and to grow it needs work. Work that I don’t think I can do alone (and stay sane).

So what else do we need to do to Ironcoder to improve things? I don’t know, but I think the Mac Developer community should have a voice. Feel free to add comments to this blog post if you have any ideas. Alternatively I’ve set up an #ironcoder IRC Channel on freenode.net

Ironcoder @ C4

2007-08-06T02:09:22Z

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

SparklePlus has Moved

2007-07-12T22:09:29Z

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.

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.

Ironcoder V: Prizes Soon

2007-04-16T15:37:47Z

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.