We caught AJ from Marketcircle again shortly after a surprise win in the Apple Design Awards for Billings 3. Here's a quick reaction!

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It's a point of pride for the developers and a highlight of WWDC week -- tonight, courtesy of Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, we congratulate the winners of the Apple Design Awards for 2009. The list includes several TUAW favorites (Things, BoinxTV, Tweetie, Billings and MLB.com) along with some fantastic efforts from students.

The full winner list thanks to The Loop and Apple's ADA listings:

I missed my chance to meet up with Vara Software at WWDC, which I was lamenting even before they went and won two Apple Design Awards, including Best Mac OS X Leopard Application. I called Paul Carnine, Vara's founder and one of its developers, to talk about the achievement, Vara Software in general, and their increasingly impressive software lineup.

The software winning all of the acclaim right now is ScreenFlow, which we excitedly covered when it was initially released. With the last several releases it's become increasingly polished and continues to be one of the best screencasting applications on the Mac market. It's possibly the only application in it's category to rightfully bill itself as a complete "studio." Apparently Apple appreciates this one as much as I do.

Apple has announced the submission deadline for the Apple Design Awards (ADA). The ADA take place every year during the World Wide Developer Conference, and recognizes the best efforts in several categories including user experience, overall application, student project and more.

Previous winners include Coda (best user experience 2007), CSSEdit 2.5 (Best Developer tool, 2007) and Comic Life (Best New Product for Mac OS X, 2005).

New this year is the iPhone category, which should be very exciting. The deadline for the 2008 ADA is May 12.

Every Mac developer wants a small, softly glowing cube -- as long as it's not made from unstable isotopes or anything like that. The Apple Design Awards 2008 entry period has now begun; with competition in seven categories this year, including two for the iPhone, it's going to be fun to see what bubbles up to the top at WWDC.

Applications in the following areas can be uploaded and entered before 5 pm May 12:

• iPhone Developer Showcase

  Highlights innovative and compelling new iPhone applications built using the Beta iPhone SDK. Entries in this category must be pre-release, feature complete versions which run within the iPhone simulator or on an iPhone or iPod touch. Apple reserves the right to award more than one winning entry in this category.

• Best iPhone Web Application

  Highlights web applications designed specifically for Safari on iPhone, which offers iPhone users innovative, compelling, valuable, and highly desirable capabilities.

• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application

  Highlights trendsetting, innovative, best-of-breed Mac OS X Leopard applications. Entries in this category must be release versions.

• Best New Mac OS X Leopard Game

  Highlights games introduced on Mac OS X Leopard after June 2007, which take full advantage of relevant Leopard technologies and offer the best entertainment value to all ages. Entries in this category must be release versions.

• Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience

  Highlights excellence in design, aesthetics, ease of use, compelling and appropriate use of animation, and pervasive integration with built-in Mac OS X Leopard system services and sharing technologies. Entries in this category must be release versions.

• Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application

  Highlights best-of-breed Mac OS X Leopard graphics and media solutions providing unparalleled functionality, performance, innovation, and stunning visuals and/or audio. Entries in this category must be release versions.

• Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product

Winners get plenty of goodies: WWDC tickets and travel, MacBook Pros, Cinema Displays, iPod touches and iPhones, and (far and away the most valuable) a free mini-booth to exhibit at Macworld Expo 2009. See Apple's official site for all the rules and regulations, and best of luck! (Yes, that's the developer team of 2007 ADA winner Panic giving a full-on geek salute there in the winner's circle. Seems like they're pretty pumped.)

Apple has announced the winners of the 2007 Apple Design Awards, and as always, the winners are a selection of the very best of OS X applications. While a good deal of the winning developers tonight received their second or even third award, it's nice to see a bunch of smaller and lesser known first time winners mixed in.

Results after the jump.

A slew of new apps have been released as of late (no doubt due to the Apple Design Awards deadline) and Freeverse didn't want to be left out of the party. Periscope is a webcam utility that adds a bunch of cool features to your Mac's webcam (builtin or otherwise). You can set it to take a pic based on motion, noise, a timer, Applescript, or by pressing the Apple Remote. Once you have a pic, or a series of pics, you can upload them to Flickr, an FTP site, or export them (you can even create a time lapse movie).

Periscope is available now for $29.95.

The crew over at iSlayer have been busy releasing major updates to their killer system monitoring widgets, and not a moment too late for this year's Apple Design Awards (entry deadline is April 23rd). Earlier this month we missed a major upgrade and UI overhaul to iStat nano, bringing the compact system monitoring widget to v2 and adding a ton of new features.

With the release of what almost looks like an all-new version of iStat pro v4, however, iSlayer has brought a consistent, uniform UI to both widgets. While I agree that you should probably sit down and take a deep breath before reading through the extensive list of changes, the big-hitters include: support for the battery meters in bluetooth keyboards and mice, instant update for things like network changes and disk mounting, a choice between memory and CPU usage in the process panel, as well as drag and drop re-ordering of sections inside the widget, allowing you to customize the layout to your heart's content.

That isn't all though - go check out the huge list of changes for either of these widgets and consider showing iSlayer some donation love for all the stellar work they've done on two of the inarguable kings of system monitoring widgets for Mac OS X.

It's that time of year again kids - the time when Mac OS X developers can submit their application to Apple for a chance to win a coveted Apple Design Award. The categories up for judging this year have actually lowered from eight to seven since 2006, shaving off Best Automator Workflow to leave us with:

• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application
• Best Mac OS X User Experience
• Best Mac OS X Developer Tool
• Best Mac OS X Game
• Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution
• Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
• Best Student Application

We know what you're saying: "Best Leopard app? But it isn't even out yet!" Don't worry, we're scratching our heads too. Even though more and more developers are already announcing Leopard-only apps, we're itching just as bad as you are to see all the wiz-bang new stuff developers' apps can do with the fancy new technologies - some of them still a secret - of Mac OS X Leopard. Fortunately, since the awards are announced at WWDC, which is where everyone thinks Leopard is going to debut anyway, we'll already have a list of rockin' apps that were chosen by the dev community themselves to hit the ground running with.

I just received another email from ADC reminding developers that the submission deadline for Apple's 2006 Design Awards is coming up - June 16th to be exact. While I'm willing to bet that most of you TUAWers aren't developers, I thought I would pass on the reminder to you just in case your favorite 3rd party app's developer could use that extra motivation to submit their product.