The fourth round of IronCoder dominated the weekend for many a nerdy Macintosh programmer last week. IronCoder is a clever little contest that grew from the brains of the regulars of the #macsb IRC channel. IronCoder starts Friday evening with a theme and required API handed down from the chairman and ends 48 hours later when the bleary-eyed contestants turn in the result of their marathon programming sessions. This time the theme was Space and the required API was Core Image.

Being a fan of both theme and API, I could barely resist in spite of my already overloaded weekend. I managed to find the time to bust out an entry by exchanging a few of the precious hours reserved for sleep for more time in front of the laptop. My entry, Star Tracer allows you to draw your own constellations over the top of a field of background stars. Core Image animated embellishments abound. Useful…probably not, but useful is worth negative points in IronCoder in case you didn’t know. Of course with anything like this there are a few goodies that I really wanted to add that didn’t quite make the final cut. Performance is also definitely not optimized, though its fairly acceptable on my common variety MacBook. Still, I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome given the time alloted and I even managed to snag a runner-up position in the rankings!

Congratulations to Jonathan of Toxic Software for his winning entry. Also thanks to Mark Dalyrmple for shouldering the burden of chairman for this round.

The flock is muzzle-down, working hard on our newest application which will have its thin veil of secrecy lifted in the not-so-distant future. While fleshing out the interface look-and-feel of our new project we discovered the need for a few fairly common controls that, unfortunately, are not a part of the standard kit Apple provides for us with Cocoa and Interface Builder.

To remedy the situation we started our own custom Interface Builder palette in house, which we now present to you in the hopes you might find it as useful as we have in your coding endeavors. The HIG may be on its deathbed, but perhaps we can at least make it a little easier to synthesize the implicit HIG.

RSControls currently provides three new Cocoa controls.

RSGradientSquareButton and RSActionPopUpButton provide two new button types that allow you to emulate the buttons and pull-downs found in applications like Mail and NetNewsWire. The best part of course is support for Panther (10.3). Take that ‘Small Square Button’ type!

RSStepperButton is a NSButton subclass appropriate for using with an icon in a toolbar. RSStepperButton allows you to easily increment its value by a fixed amount with each press. We use it for rotate buttons in our toolbar, similar to Preview. Support for bindings and a custom Inspector for IB come free of charge. RSStepperButton may not be sexy, but its reliable.

Download RSControls here.

We welcome comments, suggestions and large sacks of money.