MacMost Now 93: The 2008 Apple Design Awards

Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at the winners of this year's Apple Design Awards, including new categories for iPhone applications.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Well, the movie world has the Oscars and the music world has the Grammys.  Well, the Apple world has the Apple design awards.  Let's take a look at this year's winners on this episode of MacMost Now.
Now the strange new thing at this year's WWDC Apple Design Awards was that a lot of the awards were given out for iPhone applications -- iPhone applications we can't get yet, so we have to take Apple's word for it that they're good.
The winner for best game was Enigmo, which is a puzzle game that's already available for Mac and Windows so you can actually play it now and see why it's probably going to really good on the iPhone.  It's a fun puzzle game that's sure to take up a lot of our time.
Now also the winner for the odd category of health and fitness application is MIM, which is the application that was demoed at the keynote for medical imaging on the iPhone, although one wonders whether or not this category -- health and fitness -- is going to be there every year or whether it was specifically created for this application.
Social networking makes a little more sense that it's Twitterific.  Again, another thing that's available already on Macs so we can kind of guess how it's going to work on the iPhone.
And for entertainment application, AOL Radio.  So you'll be able to listen to 200 AOL, 150 CBS radio stations on your iPhone.  Yeah, I could see how that could be very good.
And productivity is OmniFocus.  Now the Omni Group uses a ton of productivity software for the Mac.  And it looks like OmniFocus is going to have a version for the iPhone.
Now another set of iPhone awards were web applications.  These were things that we can actually use now.  Winning for that was Remember the Milk, which is basically a to do list reminder software and a lot of people use this and love it.  Runner up for this was the AP Mobile News Network.  I've used this as well.  It's basically being able to read all the AP news, including your local headlines, in a nice iPhone interface.
I don't know if I would have left out Google and FaceBook from this category.  They certainly seem to have pretty good interfaces as well. 
Now, finally, to the Macintosh winners. So the winner for the best application is ScreenFlow.  I actually use ScreenFlow for some other podcasts.  It's from Vara Software.  It's the same company that actually makes the software I'm using right now to record MacMost and it's excellent screen cast capture software.  It captures video of you as well as your screen and allows you to do a lot of iMovie-like editing when you're done.  And runner up was Bee Docs' Timeline 3D. 
Now for best game -- another thing I've got experience in -- is Guitar Hero III.  So Guitar Hero III is certainly a great game for the Mac and it's taken up a lot of my time this year.  Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars was the runner up.
For best user experience was a program called Macnification, which is scientific imaging software to be able to organize and use scientific images.  Not something I've used, but sounds interesting.  Runner up was Checkout.  So Checkout is point of sale software.  In other words, being able to use your Macintosh in retail stores.
In the graphics and media application category, we have ScreenFlow as the winner.  Runner up was FotoMagico, which is slideshow software for high-end photographers.
The last category is for student products.  Now the winner here is Squirrel.  Squirrel is accounting software but done in a very different way, specifically for people who aren't used to accounting software.  And it was created by a single student.  The runner up is a FTP program called Flow that looks at FTP in a different kind of way.
You can go to Apple's website and check out summaries of each piece of software and links to the home pages.  I'd also like to hear from you.  Leave a comment at this post at MacMost.com and let me know if you think these were good winners, and if not, who do you think should have won each category?
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig for MacMost Now.

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 93: The 2008 Apple Design Awards”

DefenseEngineer

17 years ago

For the iPhone web applications, I would not have left out FoxNews either. It's a good interface and even has full screen iPhone video news clips. Simply directing your iPhone Safari browser to http://www.foxnews.com/ will load the iPhone version of the website. No specific URL to remember.

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MacMost Now 93: The 2008 Apple Design Awards

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 93: The 2008 Apple Design Awards”

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