In the spirit of the show Iron Chef, some mac developers have joined together for the first ever Iron Coder contest. Developers are given 24 hours to come up with something cool given an API and a theme. The API for the first contest was Accessibility and the theme was Mardi Gras.

Here are our entries (with source code!):

Jump to Iron Coder

UPDATE: You can get all of the entries here.

UPDATE 2: Lucas Eckels got the honor of being the first ever Iron Coder with his entry Symphony. Congratulations Lucas. On a completely separate note, Steve Harris of Reinvented Software and Feeder fame has created a mash-up of our submissions titled GrassyKnoll. You can now shoot beads at passing windows. Grab the mash-up here for some good laughs!

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If you are a programmer or someone who is distributing or selling a product that comes on CD/DVD, then nothing helps solidify your image than a software box. It gives off the impression that you are an established business and is an asthetically pleasing way of presenting your software or application.

Hmm… why would you photoshop a fake box, if you had a physical box you could photograph? As someone points out in the digg comments, why have a picture of a box if you don’t sell a physical box at all? Basically, this is a tutorial on how to fake out your customers. To the people who can see through the trick, it gives the impression that the product and the company are fake.

Well, we couldn’t just idly sit by and watch the cheesiness.

Hrmm… What would a real podcasting potion look like if it were created and sold in todays industrialized society? Quaint little mom and pop potion shops and their glass bottles are so passé. They wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand anyway. We need something that looks like is produced in a factory…

We are proud to announce that we have managed to make something cheesier than the fake software box — a fake podcastin’ potion:

We were brainstorming sometime before the release of iTunes 5, and I came to think about sliders. They are useful but pretty hard to use. If you want to change the value of the slider continuously, you have to grab the tiny knob and drag it around. For something like a volume slider, a real world knob is much easier to operate and more precise than anything in a computer. Well, a lot of people have mice with scroll-wheels nowadays so why not use it with the slider! Just move the mouse over a slider and scroll to adjust the value. Pretty nice idea I thought and proceeded to check a few apps to see if it was already done that way by default in OS X. Nope.

When iTunes 5 came out, I unconsciously flicked my scroll-wheel over its volume slider. It moved! I felt like a young padawan using the force for the first time. It was very strange, but in a good way. I didn’t think that anybody would be that detail oriented, or put another way: anal. Some programmer at Apple must have been thinking the same thing as me about around the same time because that feature sure wasn’t there in iTunes 4. Creepy. I might have a twin separated at birth working at Apple…

So yeah, you can use your mouse wheel to adjust volume in iTunes 5… uhm… 6. I think it’s a nice touch.

I haven’t put that in into Podcast Maker yet, but I will eventually.