Filed under: Software, Other Events
Apple Design Awards winners 2005
Every year I look forward to the World Wide Developer's Conference, and with it the winners of the Apple Design Awards. Here's a brief roundup of this year's winners.First, Panic's Transmit was awarded "Best Mac OS X Tiger Technology Adoption." If you often use FTP to transfer files and you haven't yet given Transmit a try, you owe it to yourself to do so. Transmit 3 combines great features like .Mac sync, Automator actions, Spotlight favorites and even a Dashboard widget with a beautiful and very Mac-like interface. This really is a great utility. Read C.K.'s thoughts on Transmit from last month.
Next, Delicious Monster's Delicious Libray was awarded "Best Mac OS X User Experience" (now that's an impressive sounding category). It's a very beautiful and useful database application for storing and sorting information on your media collection, including DVD's, CD's, books and video games. Track items you've loaned out with iCal and Address Book and (my favorite feature) use your iSight camera to scan product barcodes. Very cool indeed. Read about the other winners after the jump. Scott took a look at Delicious Library back in April.
The title "Best Product New to Mac OS X" was awarded to Comic Life by Plasq. Simply put, Comic Life allows you to make a series of your digital photographs look like the page of a comic book, complete with thought balloons, captions and a variety of effects (see C.K.'s post). Comic Life is closely integrated with iPhoto and, coolest of all, you can publish your final project as an iPhoto book. It's even more fun than you think it is.
The wildly popular World of Warcraft won Best Entertainment Product. I haven't played this game myself, but I know a couple of people who just love it. It's a Massively Multiplayer Online Game that takes full advantage of Tiger's Open GL.
Medical imaging product OsiriX works with such devices as MRI, CT, and PET scanners. Used by radiologists, surgeons, clinicians, scientists, and patients, OsiriX is 100% free and fully open-source. It won the award for "Best Use of Open Source."
"Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution" was awarded to Data Tank, which is used for mathematical modeling and graphics, data mining, and programming. I thought I was a rather geeky guy, but this app is way beyond me. I guess somebody's got to do the math, right?
Silverstorm won the award for "Best Mac OS X Server Solution." SilverStorm's high-performance networking and virtual I/O solutions combined with Mac OS X host software provide a 10 Gb/sec, low latency interconnect with multi-protocol support, providing Xserve cluster inter-process communication, storage and networking access through a single server connection.
"Best Mac OS X Student Project" is one I always look forward to, as I enjoy seeing what young programmers are thinking of and working on. This year, the award went to GraphClick by Simon Bovet. It's a graph digitizer software which allows to automatically retrieve the original (x,y)-data from the image of a scanned graph or from a QuickTime movie. Pretty cool.
That's it for this year. A pretty nice group if I do say so.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew Kaufmann said 3:39PM on 6-20-2005
Delicious Library looks really cool, but it'd take soooooooooooooooooooooo long to catalog everything... who has that kind of patience? I wish I were a multi-zillionaire so I could hire someone to enter in all my books and CDs and stuff. The concept of cataloging everything I have gives me a logistics headache.
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narco said 3:59PM on 6-20-2005
Yeah, I also wish I could catalog everything. I let people borrow a lot of movies, CDs and books, so this would be perfect for me since sometimes I don't ever see them again. Too bad it doesn't do vinyl.
Also, I have been using Transmit 3 and it's WONDERFUL. The magazine I work for puts out 10 magazines throughout the US, so I have to upload them to 10 different printers in 10 different states. So I just made 10 Transmit widgets for different areas, then drag the files down to my Dashboard hotcorner (the bottom right) and upload to the proper place. Makes everything SO easy. Panic is a great company.
Fishes,
narco.
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Steven said 4:07PM on 6-20-2005
Ummm, I've got over 300DVDs and it took me less than 45 minutes to scan them all in.
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Andrew Kaufmann said 4:58PM on 6-20-2005
So it recognizes DVDs like CD players recognize the tracks?
I don't have that many DVDs... it's books that worry me. Those will take foooreeeever
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Dave Caolo said 11:30PM on 6-20-2005
All I need now is an iSight!
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Ryan said 8:28PM on 6-21-2005
Tip for book readers. If the UPC barcode on the back cover doesn't work, look for an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. Have a nice day!
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