Filed under: Software, Freeware, Developer
Ironcoder V results
Ironcoder is a Mac software developer competition inspired by the cult Japanese television cooking show Iron Chef in which Mac developers have about a weekend to produce a cool piece of software based on a particular API and theme. The latest contest was Ironcoder V and featured the ScreenSaver.framework API with the theme "Life." The results are in, and the winner this time around is Ben Gottlieb, whose winning entry, WikiPath, displays a series of Wikipedia pages by following a random path (though the links) beginning from the Wikipedia entry on Life. The results page offers the winning entry plus several runners up for free download.
[Via GusMueller Blog]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Leonard Nimrod said 8:58AM on 4-05-2007
Is there a good link to the Wikipath screensaver? I'd love to check this out. The only DMG I find will not mount. Is anyone else having this problem?
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Jonathan Wight said 9:44AM on 4-05-2007
I've uploaded a zip file here: http://ironcoder.org/entries/ironcoder_5/Wikipath.zip
Not sure why some people had trouble with the dmg.
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Eli Hodapp said 9:49AM on 4-05-2007
Well this certainly is a cool screen saver, I just hope it doesn't cause any drama with people being blacklisted from Wikipedia. If I were in their shoes I wouldn't be happy if a bunch of jerks were just randomly loading pages every two seconds for the sake of a screensaver!
So far the weirdest link I've found so far between pages comes from turning the start page to random. The start page was some random California high school, which cycled through a few pages, got to the Columbine Massacre page, cycled through a few more, then ended up on John Wayne Gacy's page.
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Kelan Champagne said 2:46PM on 4-05-2007
As an entrant (I did WikiWalker, which was a similar idea to Ben's WikiPath, but not nearly as well done), I would warn people against thinking these entries are release-quality software. There are some cool ideas in there, but please remember they were coded in 48 hours, and may (read: most likely) contain bugs. Because they're mostly screensavers, there's not much risk for data-loss or anything, but they may crash System Prefs. So, just consider yourself warned.
Congratulations again to Ben!
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