ironcoder

Read all about it: Mac Developers donate sales to Children’s Toy Charity!

Total is in: $10,000! Nice job everyone!

A bevy of Ironcoder 4 wrap up posts:

• bruji, including a great overview of their entry
• allocinit.net
• Sugar Maple Software
• Rogue Sheep Software
• toxicsoftware.com
• Ars Technica interview with the winner
• borkware: Our esteemed and most venerable chairman’s blog

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.

In addition to the fame of being a winner, and getting to judge IronCoder 5, the winner of IronCoder 4 will receive a copy of Advanced Mac OS X Programming, signed by myself and Aaron Hillegass.

If anyone else would like to sponsor IronCoder 4, please drop schwatoo a line (schwa at this.domain)

Posted by Mark Dalrymple

Whoa. Wolf “Jonathan” Rentzsch is putting on a Really Cool Mac Developer Conference. Everyone should go. That’s the same week we scheduled for the next IronCoder. If everyone goes to C4, they can’t work on their IronCoder entry. Bummer. Hence therefore ergo, we’re moving IronCoder ahead a week: October 27 through the 29th. Time to put on your Halloween costumes and hack the weekend away.

Oh, and we’ve got some prizes already. Stay tuned.

The date has been set, so make sure to mark it on your calendars.

The next #macsb IronCoder contest will be October 20-22, and we’ll be doing things a lot like last time since it seemed to work out well. You’ll get the API and the theme at the same time, giving you a full 48 hours to work on your Wicked Cool Stuff(tm). The kick-off is 5pm Central Time in the US on Friday night, and real-time judging in #macsb will start at 5pm Central Time on Sunday night. (so be sure to have your entries uploaded before then.)

Hopefully we’ll have some prizes again this go-around. If you produce some nifty hardware, software, or web services, and want to sponsor the next IronCoder, please drop schwatoo a line ( at schwa at this domain) - he’ll be coordinating the prizes.

Woot!

Posted by Tom Harrington

SparklePlus has been updated to version 0.3.

Changes in this version are:

• Updated to track Sparkle version 1.1 (a.k.a. svn revision 892).
• Added hardware model-name translation when asking if the user wants to send profile information, so that the user will see (for example) “iMac (Core Duo)” instead of “iMac4,1″.
• Archive unpacking handles multiply-encoded archives such as .tar.bz2 and .tar.gz
• Fixed these bugs:
• Made the check-for-updates window show the application name instead of “Sparkle Test App”
• Make checking for updates at startup actually happen, if the user previously said it was OK. Previously this would only happen on the first execution. Thanks to Dominique Peretti for pointing this out.
• Prevent multiple calls to -checkForUpdatesInBackground: when the profile-info nib can’t be found (thanks to Dominique Peretti again).
• Fix setting an incorrect value for SUSendProfileInfoKey when the profile-info nib can’t be found (thanks to Dominique Peretti yet again).

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p>You can get SparklePlus 0.3 through SVN here at ironcoder.org. That’d be: svn co http://ironcoder.org/svn/SparklePlus/tags/release-0.3

If you prefer to just download version 0.3 without all that mucking about with svn, there’s also a convenient tarball of this release.

Or if you want to keep up to date with it, grab the trunk and take your chances: svn co http://ironcoder.org/svn/SparklePlus/trunk