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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Apple

Apple Design Award Winners Announced 25

Posted by pudge from the next-year-Dashboard-widgets-will-take-most-of-these-awards dept.
Glen Low writes "Apple has just posted the list of Apple Design Award winners for 2004. Big Bang Chess walked away with two awards: Best Product and Best Technology Adoption, and my very own Graphviz port was runner-up in Best New Product and won the Best Open Source Product. And yes, the GUI is all BSD-licensed Cocoa goodness."
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Apple Design Award Winners Announced More

Apple Design Award Winners Announced

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  • Big Bang Chess certainly is cool in its integration with iChat and Mail, but as a chess program it's not too great. It doesn't support en passant (and will in fact move your pawn forward instead, a move you didn't tell it to make if you try to capture en passant). Also, I know it's mostly meant for multiplayer use, but the singleplayer is just laughable even compared to dozens of amateur chess engines. It plays like a 10-year-old.

    • Re:Design == form over function? (Score:5, Funny)

      by undef24 ( 159451 ) on Thursday July 01, 2004 @03:15PM (#9585392)
      It plays like a 10-year-old.
      Maybe I can finally win a game! The apple chess program that comes with OS X is seriously too hard for me.
      • Indeed. Even on the lowest level setting it is near impossible for an amateur. Any explanations to why it is so?
        • I believe that Apple Chess uses the GNU Chess engine, which is more polished than Big Bang's engine (which may very well be brute force). For example, it will spend more time calculating what appear to be promising branches in the search tree. Also it has a mechanism to roughly judge the balance of a position based on factors other than the possibility for winning material or checkmate (though computers are still much weaker than humans at this in general). GNU Chess also uses an opening book, since trying to find good moves early on based on looking ahead is pretty useless. Big Bang chess almost certainly has no opening book as it doesn't even necessarily attempt to control the center, which is the first thing you learn in opening theory.
    • I'm still looking for a chess program that will actually teach me chess. I don't mean the basic moves, but things like "if you do this, you'll have a better position", or "don't do that because in 3 moves this will happen".

      Is that too much to ask of a current AI? (seriously)
      • Fritz 8 is good at this (and is really the one of the best chess programs out there), though it's only for Windows. It's the same program that got a draw against Vladmir Kramnik (the current world champion) though you can certainly turn the difficulty down :)
      • Vektor 3 [schubert-it.com] sports a game analysis feature - it's not exactly what you'ree looking for but maybe it could still be a useful thing for learning better chess.

        Anyway, it's probably the best-looking chess software ever and always a pleasure to use.

  • This Year's Candidates (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MinutiaeMan ( 681498 ) on Thursday July 01, 2004 @04:14PM (#9586134) Homepage
    I'm a little surprised that Big Bang Chess won not one, but two awards. Maybe it's just that this year's crop of candidates aren't as "impressive" as previous years [apple.com] -- I wouldn't compare BBC to, say, OmniWeb (a previous recipient of Best OS X Product Award).

    Of course, I'm not a developer myself, so I can't exactly judge too well, but based on what I do know, it seems to be a strange decision.

  • Other Graph Layout tools (Score:3, Informative)

    by rowanxmas ( 569908 ) on Thursday July 01, 2004 @04:58PM (#9586550)
    So the open source product I work in which is made in Java(yeah,yeah) integrates pretty well with the Mac, and also provides an interactive zoomable user interface, something that GraphViz has always lacked, IMHO.

    Check out www.cytoscape.org/alpha.html for the latest version. Some features include type-ahead-find for node serarching, multiple network support, and lots of integration with disparate data sources.
    • I want one with full SVG support (load and save) ... can Cyto do that yet?

    • Re:Other Graph Layout tools (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm still stunned over my win for Graphviz -- for various reasons that will eventually be made clear -- but in the true spirit of open source, I was allowed to stand on the shoulders of the AT&T giants who created the command-line tools. It feels somewhat unreal, since I was at my work computer clicking on refresh on the ADA page rather than receiving the award(s) at WWDC.

      Graphviz for Mac OS X does have an interactive zoomable interface and exports to SVG (but not imports, which might be difficult sinc

  • Animusic... (Score:3, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Thursday July 01, 2004 @05:53PM (#9587158) Homepage Journal
    You can get the DVD and video clips [animusic.com] from Animusic [animusic.com] to see the ATI Animusic's Pipe Dream Demo. Also, ATI [ati.com] has the demo if you have an high-end ATI video card which is better because you can control the camera view IIRC!

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