My Nominations for Apple Design Awards

Apple is now accepting submissions for the 2007 Apple Design Awards. Mentioning my favorites is risky business. I don't want to hurt any feelings. But the thing is, there are a lot of great apps. Some have permanently made life better for Mac users, and others are exceptional in surprising ways.

Locomotive

Locomotive: I simply don't know what the world would do without Locomotive. There'd be a lot of people who never get around to trying out Rails because not everyone is born to configure then compile layers of interdependent libraries. Locomotive bundles an entire Rails environment inside a double-clickable Mac app. Brilliant.

Skype Mac

Skype: I admit I'm not a heavy user of Skype, but from what I can tell, they really outdid themselves on the Mac version. They could have just gone the "we'll do a semi-port from Windows" route, but instead this thing really looks like Skype was designed for the Mac.

Camino Browser

Camino: I personally use Safari, but I need Gecko compatibility for various things. I realize a lot of people like Firefox, and the team undeniably does a great job, but Camino's approach of wrapping a native Cocoa engine around the Gecko core really fits my expectations better. I don't think this is a matter of Camino being better than Firefox, just simply that it deserves recognition.

Cha-Ching

Cha-Ching: People must think Midnight Apps pays me royalties, but really I just like the feel of the app and their basic philosophy. I think more Mac developers should make such unabashedly fun apps. Fun makes people happy and fun sells Macs (see Photo Booth, Comic Life). iPod syncing, even! These guys deserve to win. If they don't, I'll buy them all a round of drinks or something.

You had me at ceramic pig.

Quartz Composer Samples

Quartz Composer Samples: I don't know what the category would be, but somebody needs to get this guy an award, like, yesterday. It's some of the most stunning screensaver compositions I've ever seen, and I don't usually use the word stunning. The only gotcha is that they're posted in .sit format. Doh.

MemoryMiner

MemoryMiner: Technically, I have a conflict of interest here, but this is one impressive app. I don't think you can really appreciate it from screenshots alone, but there's nothing else quite like it. The web services side is particularly unique. It also turns out a copy is in the TED goodies bag.

The judges usually seem to make the right selections, so I have faith the deserving individuals will win. I'm sure I'm missing some obvious ones here, though a lot of fantastic apps have already won so they're out of the running. Who are your picks?
Design Element
My Nominations for Apple Design Awards
Posted Mar 13, 2007 — 14 comments below




 

Tony Arnold — Mar 13, 07 3717

CSSEdit 2. Best. Application. Ever. If you're a web developer that needs to deal with stylesheets, you have no need for anything but CSSEdit. Jan's a top guy too, which helps (All ADA winners should be nice guys).

Jonas Greitemann — Mar 13, 07 3719

CSSEdit 2

Yeah, I agree with you, Tony. CSSEdit is great, especially when you're - like me - not that good in remembering the properties' names.

lone — Mar 13, 07 3720

TextMate is also a little jewel while in capable hands. One needs to explore its ins and outs, thought, before it can be used efficiently.

Mariano — Mar 13, 07 3721

I agree, CSSEdit is a must have tool for web developers and indeed deserves recognition.

Cha-Ching is nice but still missing a couple of must-have features for this type of app. Don't get me wrong I've been using it for quite some time and I am happy with it, just wished it had some nice reports and that the budgets could actually work as budgets.

Textmate is awsome and probably the tool I use the most from the nominatios but they already won last year. Can thay win two in a row? I don't think so, specially since they have not come out with a new version since then.

Great List!

Mariano — Mar 13, 07 3722

I forgot to mention one of my favorites, which I think is worth at least an honorable mention: Pathway .

Pathway lets you build a relationship map of wikipedia's related articles. This turns out to be very useful when doing research of any type in the Wikipedia.

You can see a screenshot here

Joachim Bengtsson — Mar 13, 07 3723

CSSEdit 2, truly. Awesome app. Couldn't do web apps without it.

Dan Price — Mar 14, 07 3732

I would include http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php

Tim — Mar 15, 07 3735

CSSEdit 2 deserves a price! Not only for the looks, but for the fact that many people couldn't live without it anymore :-)

Kilian — Mar 21, 07 3755

Skype... Hmm... Audio chatting works fine, albeit the audio quality is not so convincing (compared to iChat). The text chat part is utter crap. So I'm afraid with Skype beaty is only skin deep.

Josh Pyles — Mar 21, 07 3763

Add my vote for CSSEdit 2! It's a great app and great UI!

Matthew — May 08, 07 4078

I figure we have a decent chance. Check the things Apple looks at for an application and we've done our best. Helps show things you can only do on OS X, uses a clean interface, etc.

The app has a LONG way to go, but we're happy we're part of helping people out. Thats why we do what we do, to serve the community.

I'm looking forward to getting a drink. Hey, if we win, 5 rounds on me.

Matthew Arevalo
Operations & Support
Midnight Apps

Mat — May 15, 07 4125

I think Coda is a great app. That's my vote!

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Custom website design — Dec 29, 09 7034

Cool news!




 

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