The XNA UK user group have just launched their first competition! There are three categories one for each of the key skill sets required by modern games: Artist, Musician, Game Dev.

There is a fantastic prize fund of £5000 worth of software and hardware including the latest graphics cards, tablets,  XBOX 360s, and specialised products like Sonar 6 and SoftImage XSI - all of which are built to exploit Windows Vista features. Open to UK residents only.

The theme for this years competition is Ocean Odessey. If you are missing one of the key skill sets you can sign up to the user groups 'lonely hearts' forum to advertise your skills or request the skills you need. All part of the user groups goal of bringing the skills to make great games together.

Garage Games XNA development tools and engine are also available for 30 days free trial if you need that 'drag and drop' games development experience to help you enter!!!

To find out more go here.

Digital Lifestyles also report on the Xbox Soundtracks Competition. Here you can download a game trailer, fit your own musical composition to it and up load it again to the site. The gaming public can then vote for the trailer they like the most. See here for more detail.

Have you ever found yourself with a great application idea and nowhere to put it, either because you lack the coding skills or the necessary resources? What someone applied the same format to application development that was used to bring Kelly Clarkson to the world (alright, bad example)? Phillip Ryu and co. have been running My Dream App in essentially the same way, and it’s garnered quite a following in the Mac community. Today is their final round of voting, which is being judged by a panel including our own J Allard.

In an effort to harbor equality between the platforms, occasionally we here at 10 will bring you interesting things from the boys and girls in Cupertino, CA. Here is a case where someone has a truly excellent idea (competitive software design) and given the power to people who will almost certainly become avid users of the winning applications. We like to think of this as a small-scale Imagine Cup, and we think it’s a format the Windows community should jump right into. My Dream *Vista* App anyone?