Well, the first IronCoder has come and gone. I don’t think I’ll be winning any awards, but it was still fun.

My entry is called “ShowMeYourT*ts.app” (no offense intended) and it was supposed to have lifelike beaded necklaces interracting with your applications and desktop via the Accessibility API. Unfortunately, I spent so long getting the motion physics right, and not long enough getting the beads to stop. And, well, you know, they needed to stop when they hit something. So, I stripped out all the hit detection and Accessibility API stuff, and what’s left is beaded necklaces flying across your screen Probably just serves as a screensaver and/or a distraction.

You can download the code and app here.

Feel free to open the project and play with some of the constants. Some of them are defined in a specific constants file, but others are just hard-coded inline. You can get some pretty interesting effects by playing with: the number of beads per necklace, the max distance allowed between two beads, initial speed, initial placement, initial direction, and a host of others. If you’ve got a smaller monitor, you’ll probably want a smaller initial speed. Each necklace starts out as a jumble - kinda like if you’d wadded it up in your hand - and tends to spread out as it flies.

Enjoy!

Update:The winners have been announced! And my beads physics, which not only model gravity also model the forces incurred by neighboring beads in the same necklace, got a mention. Shweet.