A month and a half ago we
announced a programming contest here at DC, to give away an amazing programming prize generously donated by long time DC forum member Chris Hanscom (
Veign.com).
Three people chose to enter the contest, with entries that could not have been more different.
Complete DC newcomer Eric Wong blew everyone away with not one but two unusual entries that were extremely impressive from a technical/programming standpoint. His first program,
Webcam Signature, uses a computer webcam to identify and track a colored object and let users create signatures from it. It's described by eric (VideoInPicture) on
this thread, and has it's own full and beautiful website along with a video demo:
here.
Eric's second submission, coded in only a couple of weeks, is called
Circle Dock, and is a wonderfully cool implementation of a circular floating toolbar/dock/start menu. Eric describes it in
this thread and has another great website for it complete with a demo movie:
here.
Long time active DC participant Eóin entered a very polished professional program for managing sets of windows system services. His program is called
ServiceProfiles, and is described on
this post has a website:
here. It's a program we expect many power users would find immediately useful and valuable:
Sometimes poster and long time DonationCoder chatroom participant Hollowlife1987 submitted
Btts, a complete standalone torrent tracker, complete with it's own web server (made in C# with asp.net). It's a pretty impressive accomplishment and a very cool demonstration of what can be done combining asp with C# in a standalone tool.
In the end we
AGONIZED over who to give the prize to. All of them really deserved it for different reasons.
It's a strange prize to give out because it's such a varied set of tools that very few people on planet earth would have real use for more than one or two of the components in it. We decided to ask the participants to tell us honestly how they would use the prize if they won it.. We do this quite a bit at DonationCoder because we try very hard to be fair and put things into the hands of those who will benefit from them.
This was actually the primary way we decided who to give the prize to -- not by deciding which program or programmer we liked best, but by deciding at this stage who we thought could most use it.
In the end we decided that there will be no single "Winner" but that:
- We will give the MSDN giveaway prize to Eóin.
- And we will create additional prizes for the other 2 entrants; Eric and Hollow both will get $250 in cash to spend as they wish (hopefully on programming related stuff!), and we'll endeavor to find some other gifts for them as well.
- And all entrants will get a custom mug commemorating the contest (hey this is the best prize of all) and free web hosting for life.
So congratulations to the 3 winners, tied for first place:
Eric Wong (VideoInPicture),
Eóin O'Callaghan, and
Hollowlife1987.
You should all be proud, and on behalf of DonationCoder and Veign, thank you for making this forum and site a more enjoyable and educational place to hang out.
I hope you will all keep us updated on your programs and future work. Eric in particular we cannot wait to see what software you develop next(!)
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