Holiday Cocoa Duel Entries are Up

Jason Harris and a dozen Cocoa programmers threw together a last-minute IronCode-style contest with the winner getting to donate the proceedes to a particular charity. The results are in, and here are a few highlights.

Daniel Jalkut wins for the nerdest look at snowflakes ever in Snow Tracker. This makes me wonder if he sees all nearby objects in his world as being bound in union rects.

John Casasanta's SantaSnaps has a certain surreal, laugh-out-loud quality. The screenshots don't do it justice. Try it.

Gus Mueller took the peaceful, poetic snowman and turned it into the CollecoVision-esque Snow Wars.

Jeremy Knope's Snowy drifts snow slowly down the screen and dispatches minature penguins. Dodging animated wildlife ads a new challenge to writing code.

Jonathan Grynspan's Snowplane has a gorgeous mood-setting effect, but the only way I could figure out to exit out of it is to manually find it in the process table. Still, great stuff. Make sure to hold down the mouse button in the middle of the snow.

Ken Sutherland's Holiday Lights attaches Christmas lights to every window, but has the most wonderfully useless options ever. The lights can blink in response to CPU or disk activity, and tiny snowplows move snow off the top of windows.

It's a tough call between SantaSnaps and Snowplane, but I think my vote is going to have to go to Snowplane for the subtlety factor.

More than anything, I think this tells me that most Cocoa programmers are insane, which is great.

Comments Temporarily Disabled

I had to temporarily disable comments due to spam. I'll re-enable them soon.