Prize giving and winners

It was with much pleasure that we presented the prizes at Malta to the winners of the Macformat/Runtime Revolution competition to write a Mac Intel native program.

First prize of a MacMini plus Enterprise license was won by Malte Brill, with his fun and beautifully presented game, Bugaboo. This surprisingly addictive game is based on the interesting topic of squishing bugs, and its hard to believe it only took Malte a couple of days to code it. Of course, it does help that he is the author of Animation Engine. Malte has generously agreed to give away a standalone of this prototype game to all our newsletter readers, so to receive your free copy please enter your email address:

If you'd like to learn how to build a game like this, he is also bundling the editable Revolution project with all copies of Animation Engine sold between now and 31st December. You can order Animation Engine now, and you'll get this entertaining, educational and beautifully commented stack free, so you can build on it yourself.

I asked Malte how he felt about winning this stunning Mac Mini and Revolution Enterprise license and he told me:

"I was so thrilled to get this prize. I wouldn't have expected to win with just a few hours of coding! This is a reassurance of the value of animationEngine and will enable me to grow my business as I can now take on a new staff member with this equipment"

Glad you liked it Malte, and can't wait to see what you produce with even more staff!

Second prize went Klaus Major, for The Exporter, a neat and deceptively simple converter which can change your Quicktime movie into a series of screenshots, jpg, gif, tiff, even pict files. It also converts audio formats and I know a great many developers out there are going to find it invaluable. You can download it for free at Major-K or if you're feeling generous give Klaus a thumbs up for his excellent work by clicking on the paypal donation link. On receiving his prize, Klaus had this to say:

"I was very happy and also surprised to receive this prize. Not only that I had a lot of fun in creating my little app, but It also made me win a new license of this excellent piece of software as a nice 'sideeffect'. Being able to personally receive the prize from Mr. Kevin Miller at the ERC in Malta was a wonderful experience. Thank you very much Runtime Revolution!"

Runtime CEO Kevin Miller, with Malte Brill and Klaus Major

Third prize went to Max Schafer for his fascinating teaching program Fifth Grade Math Practise. We loved the logic in this program, which has 8 weeks of daily lessons, in 5 sections. It takes children through fractions, addition/subtraction, geometry, gives regular maths tests and is generally a very impressive and highly functional piece of software. Check and uncheck the help to get stepped through worked examples, print worksheets for the class... I was very impressed by this software, and there must be many many teachers out there who would like to get their hands on it (and learn how Max did it so they can customise their own curriculum). Well done Max, your Studio license is on its way to you. Sorry you couldn't make it to Malta!

I'd just like to end by saying how impressed we were at Runtime by the quality of the entries for this competition. Produced in a very short time scale and polished to a professional level, you all did Revolution credit, and we look forward to running another successful competition soon!