U of S Students Win International Software Competition
Posted July 12, 2004
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - July 12, 2004 2004-07-06-ENG
U of S Students Win International Software Competition
University of Saskatchewan engineering and computer science students Carl
Norum and Chris Mullens went head to head with professional software
developers to take top spot in Apple Computer's Dashboard Contest at its
Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
"Winning this design contest was quite a feat," says U of S Engineering
professor David Dodds. "Winners of other contests at this conference were
software professionals from Macromedia, Freeverse Software, Wolfram
Research, NASA Langley Research Center and IBM."
About 3,500 software professionals attended WWDC earlier this month, and the
industry developers scooped up most of the other awards. Norum and Mullens
took home a single brand new 15" Apple Powerbook for their efforts.
Competitors had three days - the duration of the conference - to develop
their applications. In Norum and Mullens' case, this was a "widget" or
mini-application for the Dashboard interface of Apple Computer's new Mac OS
X "Tiger" operating system.
"The contest involved writing a gadget for this system using a pre-release
version of Tiger and submitting it for judging by noon Thursday," Norum
says. "So in under three days, we created this javascript/C hybrid program."
Norum graduated with a combined engineering and computer science degree this
spring. Mullens will finish a similar degree next year. Together, they
developed "GoBoard," an on-screen version of the classic Japanese strategy
board game, Go. GoBoard is basically a Mac OS X interface for GNU Go,
published by the Free Software Foundation. Along with the basic game
functions, such as choosing whether to play black or white, GoBoard has
settings for handicap and sound effects.
"The excellence of Carl and Chris's work is a tribute to their dedication
and enthusiasm, as well as the high quality of our engineering and computer
science programs at the University of Saskatchewan," Dodds says.
"Congratulations to both of these outstanding students."
A description of GoBoard, along with some screen shots of the game in
action, are available at the WWDC website at
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/dashboard.html. A full listing of winners of
other contests at the conference is available at
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ada/2004winners.html.
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For more information, contact:
Carl Norum
Work: (306) 955-7075 Ext. 504
Home: (306) 249-1579
carl.norum@usask.ca
Chris Mullens
(306) 220-0104 (cell)
(306) 373-9321
c.mullens@usask.ca
David Dodds, Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-5397
dave.dodds@usask.ca
Michael Robin
U of S Research Communications
(306) 966-2427
michael.robin@usask.ca
www.usask.ca/research
