Apple Design Award Winners Announced

EccentricAnomaly writes "Apple has announced the winners of this year's Apple Design Awards. And the winners are: Best New Mac OS X Product: Toon Boom; Most Innovative Mac OS X Product: Watson; Best Mac OS X User Experience and Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption: OmniGraffle; Best Mac OS X Open Source port: TeXShop; and Best Mac OS X Student Product: MacJournal." The last one appears to be down, due to "excessive bandwidth consumption." Maybe the Apple Design Awards people should've gotten together with the Apple iTools HomePage people.

Way to go omni

[Dirty Pickle]

I'm kind of surprised OmniOutliner didn't get a nod. Like OmniGraffle, it's an impressive show of what cocoa can do. I'm guessing they just didn't have version 2.0 out in time.

Oh, and LaunchBar [obdev.at]. I can't live without that.

cool

[angelo]

I really like TeXShop. It's quite a complete app and a good example of how good free software can be. The only thing it doesn't support yet is spaces in .tex filenames. It does, however, make great pdf files!

Re:cool

[RevAaron]

Yeah, I noticed that spaces in filenames really cornfuse it. But I indeed do love TeXShop. However, I'm not exactly sure why it's much cooler than using emacs21+xdvi, like I do when I'm at school under Solaris. I suppose it's nice to have the tables of environments and commands in TeXShop. In any case, it's nice to have a solution that is consistent with OS X itself.

Re:cool

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Actually, there are many advantages for compiling your latex code directly to pdf. In fact, this is what I'm doing on my solaris box.

I used to compile to dvi and then convert to Postscript because most of the figures I used were eps files. Most people in the lab are still working this way. When there are eps figures, xdvi basically call ghostview to convert the eps to a bitmap.

The advantages of compiling to pdf are numerous:

• Compactness - pdf files are very compact.
• Good viewer - previewing your files using acroread means you get good anti-aliasing, which is less tiring.
• Portable, pdf files can be viewed on many plateforms (more that dvi or Postscript at any rate). Also most conferences and journals accept pdf files.
• Better spacing algorithm - pdftex uses a special justification algorithm that tweaks the shape of characters - this avoids some "box overfull" messages.
• The hyper-ref package - all internal references are hyper-links, and the pdf outline is built from the latex structure. Very cool.
• With a little bit of fiddling I built a .bbl file that insert hyper-links to the original paper in the bibliography if there is an "url" entry in the .bib file.

Darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

So are these the Darwin awards???

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[Dirty Pickle]

What menu?

I wish I could offer you help with just the info you've given, but the missing piece of information is kind of the crux of the matter.

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[Teancom]

The menu bar, at the top. I.e., click on any of them (message, mailbox, format, etc), and it take 30-45 seconds before the menu "dropdown" appears. Sorry about that, I guess I should have been more clear :-)

On a slightly OT note, I'm running OSX on an original (blueberry) ibook, upgraded to 160Megs of RAM (that's a G3 300mhz) and haven't seen the perfomance issues that other people do. In fact, the Mail.app menu problem is the only speed-related thing I have to complain about, and I doubt that it is related to my processor at all (i.e., it's a config thing, or something). I'm *very* impressed! My wife's Quicken and my shell, co-existing *natively* on the same machine! w00t ;-)

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[afantee]

I use Mail everyday since 10.0 and never have that problem. It's a wonderful tool, better than Outlook on Windows in my opinion. The only minor issue is that sometime Mail refuse to quit, not a big deal because you can always force quit.

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[Alex Thorpe]

Mail takes about the average time to open up for me, say 4 or 5 'bounces'. But then I leave it running most of the time I'm in X, so I usually fire it up after a restart, which usually means after playing some games in 9.22.

Of course, right after a restart, it has to log into my DSL, so there's a wait while the Internet Connect app starts the PPPoE connection. That's another 10 seconds, usually.

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[Hes Nikke]

OpenMac is a good place to ask these quiestions, just follow the link, get the OpenMac Application and ask away! [openmac.org]

Re:Newbie OSX user...

[Hes Nikke]

i guess it helps to remember those </a> tags huh? oh well ;)

Here's the full list.

[d0n quix0te]

Best New Mac OS X Product:

Winner: Toon Boom Studio 1.1, Toon Boom
An animation tool for traditional animators that includes 2D drawing, 3D scene painting, panting to film, and sound synching.

Runner Up: Marketcircle DayLite 1.0.1, Marketcircle Inc.
A comprehensive customer relationship management tool.

Most Innovative Mac OS X Product:

Winner: Watson 1.5, Karelia Software, LLC
An innovative tool for viewing Internet-based information, with an auto-updating feature.

Runner Up: Toon Boom Studio v1.1, Toon Boom.
An animation tool for traditional animators that includes 2D drawing, 3D scene painting, panting to film, and sound synching.

Best Mac OS X User Experience:

Winner: OmniGraffle 2.0, Omni Development Inc.
An innovative, flexible diagramming and charting tool.

Runner Up: STX 1.0, Salon Transcripts
A powerful, integrated business management tool with timesheets, payroll, inventory, billing, and accounting capabilities.

Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption:

Winner: OmniGraffle 2.0, Omni Development Inc.
An innovative, flexible diagramming and charting tool.

Runner Up: Vektor 3 3.1.3, Manfred Schubert
A full-featured chess program with an innovative use of Quartz, Speech, and other Mac OS X technologies.

Best Mac OS X Open Source Port:

Winner: TeXShop 1.19, Richard Koch, Mathematics Department, University of Oregon
The ultimate tool for formatting scientific and technical documents.

Runner Up: SIDekick 1.1, Axel Wefers
A tool for salvaging legacy sound files stored on Commodore64 SID file players.

Best Mac OS X Student Product:

Winner: MacJournal 2.1, Dan Schimpf
A tool for keeping and organizing logs, diaries, journals, notes, and ideas.

Runner Up: CanCombineIcons 2.1.0, David Remahl
This tool helps you easily create icons for your applications.

Gee, thanks

[0x0d0a]

We wouln't want *Akamai* to get Slashdotted now *would we*? Thank God Slashdot can take up the slack.

Come on, posting articles is nice and all, but this server was not going to be slashdotted(period), it didn't require registration, and it isn't even noticably loaded.

And, of course, there's the legal issue that this is Apple's copyrighted content that you're moving to another site.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Apple really liked Watson...

[RevAaron]

Is there any concrete information about this? Did Apple really license/buy it and integrate it into Sherlock 3, or does it just have a lot of the same features? Has there been an announcement about it from Apple or the guy who makes Watson, or is it just jibbajabber?

Re:Apple really liked Watson...

[Alex Thorpe]

The author of Watson did announce today on MacCentral that Watson would continue to be developed and improved.

IMHO, Sherlock 3 didn't try and add more than half of the features of Watson, and Watson will be adding more before Sherlock 3 is released. I intend to keep using Watson for a long time, myself.

Re:Apple really liked Watson...

[Erik K. Veland]

Besides: Why did they add the friggin ugly brushed metal interface to Sherlock again? Arrrrrgh!

Kill brushed metal already Apple. It's ugly incosistent!

Re:Apple really liked Watson...

[RevAaron]

I agree. I don't mind it for iTunes though. QT is barely acceptable, but Sherlock with the brushed metal, blech.

Watson development to continue, says developer

[cpeterso]

Watson development to continue, says developer [macworld.com]

Dan Wood of Karelia Software, the developer of Watson, confirmed for MacCentral that he had no part in the development of Sherlock 3. Wood also confirmed that Watson is alive and well and he will continue the development of the product.

Re:Watson development to continue, says developer

[RevAaron]

Just what I was wondering. Thanks!

TeXShop

[larry bagina]

Looks pretty slick. It's not surprising it won, though -- NextStep included a TeX distribution (and had builtin previewing capabilities via Display PostScript).

Re:TeXShop

[RevAaron]

Huh? Why would NeXTSTEP coming with a TeX distro make TeXShop a likely candidate to win this award? OmniDictionary didn't have it made in the shade, just because NS used to come with a cool version of webster's dictionary...