Iron Coder v0 Winner

Congratulations to all participants in the zeroth Iron Coder challenge. We had great turnout considering the extent of our publicity effort was a couple of blog postings. There were ten entries, and not a stinker among them:

• Most Useful When Drunk: Colin Barrett’s DrunkVision displays a large mardi gras-colored translucent floating window next to your mouse pointer spelling out what you’re hovering over.

• Best Nonobvious Idea: Lucas Eckels’ Symphony creates a mardi gras-style “soundscape”, playing ongoing ambient sounds in addition to specific sounds in accordance to specific user actions (selecting menus or selecting a different row).

• Most Useful When Sober: Tom Harrington’s FFMinator implements focus-follows-mouse behavior, where windows come to front just by mousing over them. Bonus: mouse over an application icon in the Dock and all of its windows come to front at once.

• Smoothest Entry: Peter Hosey’s Beads drapes nicely-drawn beads over the frontmost window. They move from window to window depending on ordering. When all the windows are closed, the beads fade out. Very elegant, very Macintosh.

• Best Overload of Strings: Daniel Jalkut’s Iron Necklace uses Quartz Composer to display a floating string of beads, which in turn displays a string of text describing what you’re hovering over.

• Most Gratuitous Use of Categories: Andy Kim’s Parade gathers up all your windows and “parades” them, right to left, across your screen, one by one, nicely staggered. It courteously puts them back when you’re done.

• Best Use of Poof Effect: Jin Kim’s Accessibility gives you a cannon (!) that shoots a mardi gras bead-border at the frontmost window. Funtastic.

• Most Secretive: Chris Parrish’s MardiGrasSecretWords inspects the UI elements as you hover over them, and alerts you when they match certain mardi gras terms. No fair peeking at the source first.

• Tightest Physics: Blake Seely’s ShowMeYourT*ts shoots bead strings around your screen. While it doesn’t use the Accessibility API, it does model gravity.

• Most Obvious Theme Retrofit: Jonathan Wight’s Pancake Day allows you to drag a target over most icons and have its preview + name displayed in a floating window. It’s only mardi gras attribute is its name+icon.

And the winner is: Symphony. Lucas came up with a great concept and executed well, using both the API and the theme. One hidden gem is that different sounds will play in different apps — it all rides on a plist file. I like his data-driven approach.

I made fun of the entries in the chatroom, but in all seriousness the code quality was impressive considering the tight deadline. I’ve certainly handed in worse code during the halcyon MacHack hack contest days. In fact, they all worked as advertised, without a single crash. Bravo.

One entry didn’t make the deadline, but nevertheless Chris Emery and Vinay Venkatesh are soldiering on with their work: ICRadial. Still a work in progress, it aims to offer radial menus. The graphics work, but it doesn’t actually invoke menu commands (yet).

And yes, you can run all the entries at once.

Monday, March 06, 2006
12:00 AM