Attention Macintosh Programmers : Iron Coder 7 has been scheduled. Clear your weekend and put on your creative-codin’ hat. I think 7 may be my new lucky number…

Update : IC VII is going to be 9 days long and the Grand Prize is now an 8GB iPod Touch! Thanks to our Seattle brethren at Brain Murmurs for providing this enticing booty. Look for the API and theme at 7PM CST on 11.09.2007.

I’m late to the party as usual, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t urge any of you reading that don’t already know to check out Flying Meat’s new image editor : Acorn. Acorn is a light-weight bitmap image editor with a focus on ease of use. Gus took a moment to rethink the typical Photoshop interface cloning technique that most alternative editors use as a launching point and has given us something innovative and refreshing.

Rather than pummel you with a plethora of separate floating palettes, Acorn concentrates the tools you need to get your most common tasks done in a single, straightforward palette. Under the hood, Acorn leverages Core Image and the rest of Apple’s excellent graphics frameworks to bring you excellent performance and a good dose of power.My personal favorite Acorn feature : the filter panel. Flying Meat licensed RogueSheep’s Core Image filtering library found in our Magma Effects InDesign plug-in for Acorn. Applying image effects in Acorn uses the very same core component found in Magma Effects! There’s a little sheep in that nut. I’ll let you in on a secret: there is also a sheepy easter egg in Acorn as well. Good hunting!

Gus tells me Acorn has been doing quite well. The reviews across the web are very favorable. Acorn also enjoyed being in the top 10 of Apple’s most popular downloads for a good run over at the Downloads site. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, be sure to check it out.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Gus builds on top of this excellent premiere release.

Over the course of a normal day I tend to end up with somewhere between five and ten iChat conversations rolling. You can imagine that I might be a little excited about tabbed chat windows in Leopard! To deal with the mess of windows this generates I have a habit of minimizing a chat window when the conversation has paused.

When you do this on OS X, the minimized window is represented in the Dock as your chat buddy’s picture. By complete coincidence, two of my buddies (who don’t happen to know each other) have pictures on their accounts that made a perfect little portrait when minimized to the Dock yesterday :