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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