Apple Design Awards 2007

Best Mac OS X Leopard Application

Winner

Delicious Library 2.0 (prerelease)

Delicious Monster

Delicious Library allows you to catalog, browse, and share all your books, movies, music, and video games. When version 1.0 first arrived on Mac OS X, it set a new standard for user experience and redefined user expectations for this category of software. Written using Objective-C 2.0, Delicious Library 2.0 (alpha), which is currently not available, uses a slew of new Leopard technologies to do more with less, such as:

• Core Data - Stores thousands of library assets and increases overall performance
• Core Animation - Adds animation throughout the interface and removes thousands of lines of custom animation code
• Calendar Store - The Calendar Store framework assists the integration with iCal
• Scripting Bridge - Directly communicates with iWeb for web publishing and with iTunes to obtain album cover art, thus reducing its hardware footprint
• Spotlight - Enhanced Spotlight integration and the NSPredicateEditor UI enables smart shelves
• Core Image - Allows visual effects to be applied to cover art and used throughout the UI
• Image IO - Handles reading & parsing images of various formats

Runner-Up

iBank 3.0a (prerelease)

IGG Software, LLC

Best Mac OS X User Experience

Winner

Coda 1.0

Panic Inc.

Coda is a unique web development environment that offers a complete file browser (both locally and remotely), publishing, full-featured text editor, WebKit-based preview, CSS editor with visual tools, full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more. Coda is the Mac's first one-window Web development application that integrates numerous modules into one cohesive user experience. Coda is a great Mac OS X citizen and integrates technologies such as:

• Resolution Independence
• Javascript debugging
• WebKit - Allows web page previews
• OpenGL - Provides silky-smooth transition animations in their 'Books' section
• Quartz Composer - Programatically creates graphics
• Core Text - Provides beautiful text rendering
• QuickTime - Offers image and movie previews
• BSD Layer - Creates networking, filesystem processes, and other features
  

Best Mac OS X Developer Tool

Winner

CSSEdit 2.5

MacRabbit

CSSEdit has a polished and focused Aqua interface that sports flexible tabs, intuitive visual editors, and exhibits extreme attention to detail. CSSEdit offers real-time styling for absolutely any web page using technologies in a variety of ways:

• Websites powered by a complex database or using advanced AJAX can be styled and analyzed without the hassle of uploading or refreshing.
• Advanced Preview and Xray analysis tools make managing complex style sheets easy.
• Source code can be edited using CSSEdit's intelligent CodeSense, or manually.
• Written entirely in Cocoa by one programmer, CSSEdit takes full advantage of the advanced capabilities of WebKit, digging deep into the framework to provide fine-grained updating of style sheets, Quartz, OpenGL, and Core Image to enhance the user experience with crisp graphics, subtle animations, and smooth transitions

Best Mac OS X Game

Winner

World of Warcraft:
The Burning Crusade 2.0

Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft is the world's #1 Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) with over eight and a half million current subscribers. Players adventure together in an enormous, persistent game world, forming friendships, slaying monsters, and engaging in epic quests that can span days or weeks. The Burning Crusade, the first expansion pack for World of Warcraft, continues to be highly optimized for Mac OS X technologies such as multi-threaded OpenGL. The implementation of multi-threaded OpenGL utilizes the multiple cores found in every Mac, and brings a performance gain of 2X. Other Mac OS X technologies used, include:

• OpenGL Arb Shaders - Offers stunning, full screen visual effects
• CoreAudio - Provides rich, 5.1 surround sound
• BSD Libraries - Allows I/O and networking
• iTunes Integration - Allows players to have full control over their iTunes while playing the game

Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution

Winner

Papers 1.0

Alexander Griekspoor

Scientists have been waiting for a solution like Papers for years, and now it's finally here—exclusively on Mac OS X. Written entirely in Cocoa by two part-time programmers, Papers helps scientists and researchers organize their personal library of scientific articles. It also provides a completely new workflow for reading scientific articles with the ability to search for literature through the built-in access to the PubMed search engine, the major source of scientific research in the biomedical domain. Papers offers downloading, archiving, reading, and sharing PDFs all within a gorgeous user interface.

Papers uses a host of Mac OS X technologies, including:

• CoreData - Supports its database model
• WebKit - Enables the display of webpages, automatic downloading of PDFs, and interactive web-based Help Center content
• PDFKit - Allows the display of PDFs both in tabs and fullscreen mode
• NSXML - Framework for parsing Pubmed and RDF records using XPath queries
• Spotlight and NSPredicate - Facilitates database queries and smart groups
• Quartz and Core Image - Creates visual animations such as, switching tabs, sending email, and exiting fullscreen
• AppleScript - Integrates with Mail
• Various system configuration frameworks to change the program's behavior on the basis of network connectivity and default handlers for different filetypes.

Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget

Winner

BART Widget 1.0

Bret Victor

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) widget allows commuters to plan trips on the BART subway system in the San Francisco Bay Area. Users can glance at the widget to see when the next trains are coming, or explore the BART system in space and time. This widget isn't just a web front-end and it doesn't require a network connection since, after all, there is no network connection in many train stations. It has schedule data built in, and uses integrated routing and scheduling algorithms to calculate the fastest trips.

The BART widget replaces simpler, traditional web interfaces with a more intuitive design incorporating direct manipulation, immediate feedback, and speech synthesis to inform users of arriving or departing trains. In addition, it makes extensive use of the Canvas element and its related methods for the trip timeline and maps, and AJAX and Javascript for the rest of its capabilities — is an excellent example of how much value a widget can provide.

Best Mac OS X Student Product

Winner

Picturesque 1.0

Zac Cohan and Nik Youdale

Picturesque is a batch image beautifier with a simple, modern, drag-and-drop interface. Picturesque easily enhances the aesthetics of images with such tasteful effects as reflections, glows, shadows, curves, strokes and fades. Picturesque shines in its ability to apply all of its included effects on multiple images in batch mode. Designers can save significant amounts of time by beautifying all their images at once using Picturesque's Automator and AppleScript support.

Written by two students, entirely in Cocoa, Picturesque takes full advantage of Cocoa drawing and Core Graphics to provide beautiful image effects, and Cocoa scripting to make all image properties in Picturesque fully AppleScriptable. This scriptability opens the door for nine Automator actions allowing users to achieve gorgeous results in a fully automated manner.