Apple Design Awards 2007

So the winners of the Apple Design Awards for 2007 have been announced.

Leopard

For me, the most remarkable thing about the awards this year is that there is a category for applications which run on an operating system that won’t even be released until October this year.

Will Shipley has apparently been able to develop an application that uses:

  • Core Data - Stores thousands of library assets and increases overall performance
  • Core Animation - Adds animation throughout the interface and removes thousands of lines of custom animation code
  • Calendar Store - The Calendar Store framework assists the integration with iCal
  • Scripting Bridge - Directly communicates with iWeb for web publishing and with iTunes to obtain album cover art, thus reducing its hardware footprint
  • Spotlight - Enhanced Spotlight integration and the NSPredicateEditor UI enables smart shelves
  • Core Image - Allows visual effects to be applied to cover art and used throughout the UI
  • Image IO - Handles reading & parsing images of various formats

This is the next most interesting thing about the award results: those of you without access to the Leopard seeds can deduce from this that they are stable enough to produce a massive, complex application in Objective-C using the supplied developer tools. Either that or Will Shipley has the patience of a saint. Or he’s a genius.