APPLE DESIGN AWARDS

I got a new email on the Apple Developer Connection mailing list today announcing that entries are open for the 2006 Apple Design Awards, to be presented at this year’s worldwide developer conference. I went to check it out, interested after Blender received runner up last year in the Best use of Open Source category, but upon arriving at the site was quite disappointed to see that the category no longer exists. An open source award has existed in some form since 2002, amongst other fluctuating categories, as documented on Wikipedia’s ADA page and it was great to see Apple recognising the open source applications that helped make the platform great. This year there are two new categories, Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget and Best Mac OS X Automator Workflow, and although it’s understandable that they want to encourage these areas to spur on developers to create content, it does seem quite a shame that these more self-promotional categories seem to have edged out others.

It’s also interesting to see that rather than a category like ‘best new technology adoption’, there is only Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics, which would now exclude apps concentrating on sound, or WebCore, or CoreData, etc or anything that is a good use of the OS technology which isn’t particularly visually flashy. Good use of visual technologies, while extremely important, are still a subset of what comprises good interface design, but I guess Apple are giving away the awards, so they have every right to decide what they want to include. Still, I hope they at least reconsider bringing back the Open Source award in coming years. If anything it’s a nice gesture to let Mac OSS developers feel loved :)