StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Etcher: This application was the winner this time around. It develops the retro theme by creating a virtual Etch-a-Sketch application that uses the Core Animation framework for turning knobs of the gizmo. The developer added the extra realism by tapping into the Sudden Motion Sensor framework to let you shake your Etch-a-Sketch in order to erase your carefully crafted image. The bad news is that creating a decent drawing is every bit as difficult as you remember.

Dekstop Pattern: If there had been a prize awarded to the most retro, Gus Meuller's Desktop Pattern would surely win it. Gus created an application that mimics the Desktop Pattern feature in Mac OS 6. When launched, the application shows you a window with a 10x10 pixel square that allows the user to turn pixels on and off, creating either a black or white square. The result is your 10x10 square repeated on your desktop. Don't work too hard though, since there is no way to save a pattern or to keep it after quitting the app. What do you expect in a week?

ArcadeTextEdit: As long as we're doing imaginary prizes, most likely to draw a lawsuit would go to Arcade Text Edit. This application makes writing fun, and if it had save functionality I might be using it right now. Backed with a Super Mario Brother’s theme and clouds floating about, the text entry window keeps an arbitrary score as you type. Certain words get you bonus points and little animations, and the entire time it plays the Super Mario Brother’s theme song!

Pop Rock: Pop Rock will scare you if you don't turn your volume or read the ReadMe first. What starts as an innocent enough icon floating in your Dock turns into a rowdy rock concert when you launch a new application. The performance, which takes up your whole screen, is given by the icon of the application just launched holding a guitar and playing a guitar riff. The audience, which is made up of the rest of your launched applications, jumps up and down with jubilation. If you need a reason to get excited about launching Quicken, then this is for you.

Adventure Time: At first glance Adventure Time, is a pretty funny choose your own adventure game about saving the world from a Delicious Monster and saving Grubber from Vista. Unfortunately, except for the Delicious Monster portion the story isn't finished. But the author created this app as more of a choose-your-own-adventure engine. A user can create new images and edit some .plist files and make their own story, or finish this one.

This list is just a sampling of the entrants into the contest, so make sure you go and check out the rest. I'm not sure why I like this competition so much. It may be the community feel of it, or it could be the new batch of applications to try at the end. Whatever it is, I hope the competition continues long into the future.

RThurmont wrote:While you're busy screwing around with garbage crapware like that, written as part of some dumbass Iron Chef-rip off competition, I'll be making use of geniunely good, useful software (like vim, less, git, sendmail and popa3d)

RThurmont wrote:All I can say is "eew".

While you're busy screwing around with garbage crapware like that, written as part of some dumbass Iron Chef-rip off competition, I'll be making use of geniunely good, useful software (like vim, less, git, sendmail and popa3d) and poor, but still useful software (like Dreamweaver).

Software that is neither useful, nor good, is just annoying, and every single one of the above programs sounds, frankly, horrific, like gigantic, bloated variants on a Hello World.

RThurmont wrote:I've also written a working text editor. A shitty one, mind you, but it does work, and gets less shitty each day I find time to work on it...

In other words, you're reinventing the wheel. You have a lot of nerve ragging on developers who are writing original software just for a lark.

RThurmont wrote:You have a point. I could respond by pointing out though that most OS X dashboard apps aren't as geniunely useless as the above. I could also perhaps respond with the valid point that as a novice programmer, I'm re-inventing the wheel for purposes of studying how code works, in preparation to write programs that do not reinvent the wheel, whereas the Iron Coder winners are seasoned, expert programmers who seem to be messing with cute little GUIs rather than doing anything deeply meaningful.

However, I was reminded of the real reason why this kind of "cute app" grosses me out to such a point when stumbling across the Wikipedia entry on an old "friend", Logo. In fourth grade (in 1994/95), as part of a pathetic attempt at providing some education regarding computers, the curiculum consisted of retyping disgusting little pre-designed programs that consisted of a series of graphical puns, executed in Logo, including, but not limited to, drawing a stupid clock that would fly across a screen followed by a predictably inane comment about "how time flies."

This very nearly turned me off to programming for a lifetime, and was especially horrific in the context that I, at the time, had a very reasonable AM386 at home (with an unusually large 120 mb Seagate IDE disk, that still works to this date), and the programming in question was being done on antiquated Apple ][ systems in varying states of decreptitude.

Fortunately, after over a decade, the bad taste left in my mouth with that Logo experience has vanished, but I continue to view "cute" programs written in a tongue-in-cheek manner with some degree of disgust, regardless of the amount of skill required in their creation.