Santa Clara, CA--Independent software developers can't help themselves--they keep creating cool, useful, even beautiful applications for the Macintosh platform. Proof can be found at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, where the winners of the third and final round of O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Contest were announced today. Sponsored by Apple Developer Connection (ADC), the contest rewards innovative Mac OS X applications, plug-ins, user interface widgets, or other creative original software. Entries are judged on innovation, ease of use, adherence to the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines, and use of Mac OS X technologies.
In a special presentation at the Conference, past and current winners gave status reports on their projects and fielded questions from the audience about how to develop award-winning apps for the Mac. After the presentation, conference-goers were treated to a reception hosted by ADC.
"I'm particularly excited about the fact that all of our winners have involved their users in the development of these terrific apps,” said Derrick Story, MacDevCenter managing editor. “Each one of them has done a great job of listening to the people who've embraced their applications, and then incorporating that feedback and making their software even better."
Mac OS X Innovators Contest winners are:
First Place, US Category
OmniOutliner
http://www.omnigroup.com
OmniOutliner is an indispensable program for outlining and organizing
information. It helps you kick-start your creativity, hatch new thoughts, and gradually organize a collection of preliminary ideas into a cohesive plan--anything from a grocery trip to a complex business proposal. OmniOutliner uses intuitive commands and an elegant interface to help you maintain multiple to-do lists, manage tasks, track expenses, take meeting notes, monitor project status--and much more.
Second Place, US Category
Sarat Kongara
iBlog
http://www.lifli.com
iBlog is an elegant desktop weblogging application that makes authoring and
publishing your personal weblogs a breeze. Unlike other weblogging sytems,
you don't have to be an expert database administrator or a Perl programmer
to setup and use iBlog. You can preview and publish your weblogs to your
iDisk with a single click of a button.
First Place, International Category
Boinx Software
Oliver Breidenbach
iStopMotion
http://www.istopmotion.com
iStopMotion is a stop-motion animation (Claymation) and time-lapse recording
software for the digital hub. Connect a DV video camera and have fun. Used
in education, by movie professionals and at home, iStopMotion uses
QuickTime, Cocoa, Quartz Extreme, OpenGL, and other fine Apple technologies
to perform its magic.
Second Place, International Category
Alan C. Smith
ACSLogo
ACSLogo is an interpreter for the popular Logo programming language. Logo is a highly graphical language--by programming a turtle to move around a computer screen (drawing as it goes), the user can learn programming skills such as using procedures and recursion. This highly graphic nature is particularly suited to OS X--ACSLogo makes a lot of use of OS X features such as transparency, anti-aliased lines and text, standard color and font palettes, as well as providing help through the Apple Help Viewer, and drag-and-drop functionality. Pictures can be exported to TIFF, animations can be exported to Quicktime movies, and vector graphics can be exported to SVG.
Honorable Mention
Philippe Mougin
F-Script
http://www.fscript.org
F-Script is a lightweight, object-oriented scripting layer specifically
designed for Mac OS X object system (i.e. Cocoa). F-Script provides
scripting and interactive access to Cocoa frameworks and custom Objective-C
objects. It aims to be a useful and fun tool for both beginners and experts,
allowing users to interactively explore, test, and use Cocoa-based objects and
frameworks.
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.