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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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?

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