We had six entries in our fall contest, for best use of sound in a program. Thanks to everyone who entered!  It was a lot of fun to give each entry a whirl, and deciding which three should win a prize wasn’t easy! And, if you read on, you’ll learn that we added a fourth!

First, let me summarize each entry, and let you know which three are the finalists. Then I’ll rank the top three as second runner-up, first runner-up and grand-prize winner. In case you’re too impatient to read these judging notes, just skip down to the end! (sorry, you'll have to use the scroll bar to do that; I can't figure out how to get anchor tags to work in our HTML editor ;( ).

Entry summaries (in order of entry submission date)

1) NanoScaleExplorer, by Phrogger. First, thanks Phrogger, for breaking the ice with the first entry - we were wondering there for awhile whether anyone was going to start coding! Now, as for the merits of your entry, the concept was intriguing, but it wasn’t clear whether this was meant to be a real entry or just a brainstorm. Nothing seemed to happen that made a sound go off. So, while the idea of associating a sound with a scaling effect (I think that was the idea!) has potential, the code wasn’t far enough along to make it into the list of finalists.

2) Clicks, by Mitch. This tightly written program has a cool intro screen that lets you know what you are in for – your mouse needs to get busy or you don’t stand a chance! After the intro, an alert message pops-up with game play instructions and waits for you to click OK – then you have 10 seconds to click on 10 balls, with a status bar tracking your time and a 3-second warning buzzer letting you know when to panic if you’re slow. When you click on a ball, you hear a nice “bloop” sound as the ball disappears; if you miss, you hear a “whish” and must click on OK in an alert message box to resume – a huge penalty since you only have 10 seconds to play! When it’s all over, a voice tells you “game over” (you might detect a slight French accent to these English words!). Overall, this is a solid example of how audio can cue a user into knowing what is happening in a game even with very brief sounds, and the sounds here make a big difference in the game play experience. Mitch, had the competition not been so stiff, this program would definitely have made it into the top 3 and in fact, the judges all agreed that it deserves some recognition, so we are giving you a consolation prize (read further below)!

3) Phylophone, by TomDad. This was clearly the most ambitious entry, in that it creates a real music scale keyboard. I’m not sure if the keyboard maps to the notes of an octave but the sound scale works. Running Phrogram on Vista, an error message kept popping up to say “a runtime error has occurred and the KPL debugger encountered an internal error while processing the runtime error” after about six or seven sounds – that’s a drag because it doesn’t explain how to fix the error (something we should probably look into on our end!). But the program ran just fine on Windows XP and the large screen size was great! This program is worthy of kudos because sound isn’t used simply in the background, it’s part of the experience, and that’s exactly what we were looking for in contest entries. So it lands in our list of top three finalists with ease.

4) Spelling Bee, by Rust Family. In about 300 lines of code, Spelling Bee lets up to four players play multiple rounds of a contest where an announcer pronounces a word and each player must spell it correctly. If you don’t, the announcer tells you in a somber voice, “I’m sorry, that is wrong.” If you get it right, your little stick man jumps up and down in joy and an audience (somewhere!) claps at your success. The program is refreshingly forgiving; it says everyone is a winner even when everyone gets the word wrong (as opposed to we're all losers!). Its logic also limits the player list to the number of stick men that can fit comfortably on the screen (although you just need to change one parameter to make it less than 4) and if the number of rounds is not specified, you’ll be playing all the way into the 10^th round! What’s very cool about Spelling Bee is how text entry, sound and visuals all combine to create a complete game experience. So this entry also easily takes one of the top 3 spots.

5) Phro-Jong Solitaire, by Camille Rust. Camille’s entry would easily capture a prize for graphics if that was what this contest was all about. The opening “play” screen has a beautiful Chinese pagoda on a dark night, and the board is a beautiful scene of a mountain range somewhere in ancient China. The game uses 40 tiles that certainly look authentic! The background crickets are a soothing sound as you study the board and ponder your next move and one makes a sudden chirp of excitement when you match two tiles to take tiles off the board. As a solitaire game (which we may consider as the subject for a future programming contest!), this is a great entry and the sound adds a lot of atmosphere to the rich media experience. But particular sounds are not integral to the user experience, and because it faced some pretty stiff competition, this entry doesn’t quite make it into the top 3 finalists list – but … nice try, Camille, and we hope to see more entries from you in future contests!

6) MorseCoder, by Rust Family. We loved the idea behind this program – it uses both sound and visuals to convey information that was massively valuable in our pre-digital world, with a technology that was a breakthrough in its day, revolutionizing the world of communication! If you give Morse Coder a long sentence, it takes awhile to emit the beeps and show the dots and dashes, but then that was what “real time” communication felt like 100 years ago, and it must not have seemed too long when you were on a ship trying to pick up someone’s SOS from out in the murky deep. Morse code has such a huge part in the history of communications, this program really pays tribute to one of the earliest technologies of the information age. So Rust Family, this is a clear finalist … now the question is - third, second or first place?

Prize winners

Now, it’s time to rank the top three and also add Clicks as the fourth, winning a consolation prize. Of course, this is a highly subjective process because all of our finalists submitted very interesting and worthy programs, so your own opinion may reasonably differ. But, after due consideration, here are the official results of the judges!

Consolation prize goes to Clicks, a program that uses sound in a way that gives the user very clear audio cues on how to play a game … well done, Mitch! And your consolation prize is our advanced add-in library, Precision Math!

2^nd runner up goes to Morse Coder, a digital tool that demonstrates one of the most important analog technologies ever developed.  Congratulations, Rust Family, you win your choice of Phrogram Talk or Precision Math!

1^st runner up goes to Phylophone, a sound keyboard program written in Phrogram … Congratulations, TomDad, you have won a free copy of Phrogram Express!

And the winner is (drum roll, please) ... Spelling Bee, by Rust Family, for a program that shows how sound doesn’t just enhance a program, it can really define it  in a very cool way. Congratulations, Rust Family, you win a free copy of Phrogram Standard!

So, with its two entries, Rust Family is our first double winner – so I guess that means congratulations are due twice!

2nd Runner -Up	First Runner-Up	& the Winner is ...