Another Iron Coder weekend is wrapped up officially, as this round’s judge Jon Wight announced on the Iron Coder Blog. Ben Gottlieb won with his WikiPath screensaver. Congratulations, Ben!

My entry received an honorable mention as the “Best Non-Screensaver.” I thought everybody would do a screensaver, and I should try to be a little different. Viva is an application that lets you tile multiple screensavers on your desktop. Fun times. But run the app before you run the .saver – there’s a bug.

Big thanks to Jon for sacrificing many hours and making the difficult decisions as judge.

Somerville, MA. April 1, 2007

Red Sweater Software today announced that is has acquired taste. After years of speculation about such a move, the company said that it realized the time had finally come.

“Taste can be difficult to spot, and a real challenge to capture. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve simply acquired it,” said Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software. “If taste is what you’re looking for, we’ve got loads of it.”

Red Sweater’s acquisition of taste marks the latest in a series of high profile transactions. It recently purchased MarsEdit, the Mac’s leading blog-publishing software, and MacXword, which it has rebranded as Black Ink, the ultimate crossword-solving application for Mac OS X.

Asked if yet more acquisitions were on the radar, Jalkut took a defensive stance: “We have no comment about future acquisitions that Red Sweater may or may not be pursuing.” However, when pressed for details, Jalkut confided that “the company is running low on T-shirts. We may soon be acquiring a few of the latest Daring Fireball designs, to boost employee morale.” When asked to elaborate on these plans, Jalkut declined to make further comments.

A round of bug fixes and minor tweaks for Black Ink:

• Fix memory leaks
• Allow selection for copy/paste of clue text and puzzle credits
• Fix for “smart quotes” and similar characters found in some puzzles
• Fix bug with puzzles having no value for any of author, title, or copyright
• Add menu link to “Get More Puzzles…”
• Fix “Show By Text” color order in Preferences
• Center checkbox in web sources table and fix bug with size of table header for Web Sources

If you’ve been sitting on the fence about whether to participate in Iron Coder, maybe this will push you over the edge. Just announced: the winner of Iron Coder V will receive free admission to C4[1]!

Start your engines lady and gentleman coders, get ye to the Iron Coder starting line this Friday evening!.