Uh, Wow (Apple Design Awards)

So the Apple Design Awards were announced today, and the biggest news from it, of course, was Inventive / Widget Machine co-developed iClip lite taking home the award for Best Dashboard Widget.

But wait, going back a bit, this was the first ADA ceremony I had the opportunity to attend, and the whole thing was a pretty awesome experience. The event was held in a pretty atmospheric room, complete with a fog machine, purple lighting, and thumping music, and the second coolest part (besides accepting the award) was the opening video sequence, which featured all of the entered applications flying past the screen. Really, really cool.

After each of the winners were announced, runners up first, winners second, the winners were demoed by Apple User Experience Evangelist John Geleynse, who did a pretty good job showing off all of the winning apps. (I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes, demoing Scientific Solution winner, EnzymeX! (By the way, the developers of that application have a great article about the infamous ADA “cube” trophy which is a pretty interesting read.)

7 Apps on Leopard’s Hit List

While yesterday’s preview of Leopard didn’t show too much (I’m talking about the “top secret” features that Steve left out this time around), it did show enough to, well, make quite a few shareware and freeware applications somewhat obsolete. We all know that Apple doesn’t have a problem scalping the Mac shareware market for good ideas (think Watson), and ultimately I don’t have a huge problem with it as long as Apple’s solutions are better. But whether it’s justifiable or not what they do, they have done it, and are continuing to do it with OS X Leopard. Here’s a list of existing 3rd party applications that are going to find themselves losing a lot of sales or a lot of downloads in the upcoming months with 10.5′s upcoming release. Or, alternatively and rather optimistically, you can take it as a list of applications to hold you over and in many cases provide satisfying near-Leopard functionality until you can get your hands on the upgrade.

Reliving the Keynote

Christmas came early this year when my dad let me borrow his WWDC badge for the keynote (he wasn’t too interested in camping out), so I thought I’d extend the favor to you guys and let you at least see what it’s like. For the record, my first stevenote, and, well, it was an experience. So, to begin, John Casasanta (iClip), Austin Sarner (AppZapper), Blake Burris (CocoaRadio) and I enter Moscone center at around 8 am. Doesn’t look too bad, looks like we beat the crowd?!

We go up the escalators to the second floor… crowd’s pretty sparse. We leave Blake at the media desk. (He has some trouble with the guy there and ends up waiting 45 minutes for his press badge, but beats us out at the end with a seat six rows from the stage.)

Keynote Video

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/aug_2006/event/index.html

Conference ends

Special thanks to our sources, that we have made use of today. A roundup/recap article will be produced for release overnight.

Leopard Video Footage

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard
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Leopard SHIP DATE

Leopard will ship in Spring

Recap

MacRumors

11:23 am	revolutionary tech of tiger to the next level – spotlight, dashboard, webclip developer tools with dashcode xcode 3.0 released today giant leap in xcode
11:22 am	new universal access parental controls dramatically enhanced Boot camp 1.0 next gen of front row photobooth ichat mail didn’t talk about ical – moving to multiuser
11:22 am	core animation
11:22 am	full 64 bit top to bottom

OSX Wrap Up

Steve “Life at Apple is a rollercoaster”

These are just 10 great features of 10.5 Leopard

Major new OSX Features (14) – iChat cont.

Keynote presentation. Working transistions and effects. Great for remote client collaboration on projects.

Backdrops – “wouldn’t it be great if you could be somewhere other than where you are?”

No greenscreen, photo and video compatible. Time square, rollercoaster.

Major new OSX Features (13) – iChat

MacRumors

11:17 am	Schiller in little window on side of screen
11:17 am	Schiller showing photo stream while talking to steve
11:17 am	demo’ing iChat Theater
11:17 am	amazing real time effects “it’s a little weird” – steve
11:16 am	having fun with filters
11:16 am	jay leno look
11:16 am	photobooth effects
11:16 am	ichat video conference with Phil Schiller
11:15 am	demos
11:15 am	show keynote presentation backdrops
11:15 am	show slides to family and friends iphoto slideshow that you can talk over
11:15 am	ichat theater
11:14 am	make it better – multiple logins, visibility, animated icons, video recording, and tabbed chats