Apple Design Award Winners Announced

Glen Low writes "Apple has just posted the list of Apple Design Award winners for 2004. Big Bang Chess walked away with two awards: Best Product and Best Technology Adoption, and my very own Graphviz port was runner-up in Best New Product and won the Best Open Source Product. And yes, the GUI is all BSD-licensed Cocoa goodness."

Comments

Design == form over function?

[hunterx11]

Big Bang Chess certainly is cool in its integration with iChat and Mail, but as a chess program it's not too great. It doesn't support en passant (and will in fact move your pawn forward instead, a move you didn't tell it to make if you try to capture en passant). Also, I know it's mostly meant for multiplayer use, but the singleplayer is just laughable even compared to dozens of amateur chess engines. It plays like a 10-year-old.

Re:Design == form over function?

[undef24]

It plays like a 10-year-old.
Maybe I can finally win a game! The apple chess program that comes with OS X is seriously too hard for me.

Re:Design == form over function?

[Meneudo]

Indeed. Even on the lowest level setting it is near impossible for an amateur. Any explanations to why it is so?

Re:Design == form over function?

[hunterx11]

I believe that Apple Chess uses the GNU Chess engine, which is more polished than Big Bang's engine (which may very well be brute force). For example, it will spend more time calculating what appear to be promising branches in the search tree. Also it has a mechanism to roughly judge the balance of a position based on factors other than the possibility for winning material or checkmate (though computers are still much weaker than humans at this in general). GNU Chess also uses an opening book, since trying to find good moves early on based on looking ahead is pretty useless. Big Bang chess almost certainly has no opening book as it doesn't even necessarily attempt to control the center, which is the first thing you learn in opening theory.

Re:Design == form over function?

[yuvtob]

I'm still looking for a chess program that will actually teach me chess. I don't mean the basic moves, but things like "if you do this, you'll have a better position", or "don't do that because in 3 moves this will happen".

Is that too much to ask of a current AI? (seriously)

Re:Design == form over function?

[hunterx11]

Fritz 8 is good at this (and is really the one of the best chess programs out there), though it's only for Windows. It's the same program that got a draw against Vladmir Kramnik (the current world champion) though you can certainly turn the difficulty down :)

Re:Design == form over function?

[capmilk]

Vektor 3 sports a game analysis feature - it's not exactly what you'ree looking for but maybe it could still be a useful thing for learning better chess.

Anyway, it's probably the best-looking chess software ever and always a pleasure to use.

This Year's Candidates

[MinutiaeMan]

I'm a little surprised that Big Bang Chess won not one, but two awards. Maybe it's just that this year's crop of candidates aren't as "impressive" as previous years -- I wouldn't compare BBC to, say, OmniWeb (a previous recipient of Best OS X Product Award).

Of course, I'm not a developer myself, so I can't exactly judge too well, but based on what I do know, it seems to be a strange decision.

Other Graph Layout tools

[rowanxmas]

So the open source product I work in which is made in Java(yeah,yeah) integrates pretty well with the Mac, and also provides an interactive zoomable user interface, something that GraphViz has always lacked, IMHO.

Check out www.cytoscape.org/alpha.html for the latest version. Some features include type-ahead-find for node serarching, multiple network support, and lots of integration with disparate data sources.

Re:Other Graph Layout tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still stunned over my win for Graphviz -- for various reasons that will eventually be made clear -- but in the true spirit of open source, I was allowed to stand on the shoulders of the AT&T giants who created the command-line tools. It feels somewhat unreal, since I was at my work computer clicking on refresh on the ADA page rather than receiving the award(s) at WWDC.

Graphviz for Mac OS X does have an interactive zoomable interface and exports to SVG (but not imports, which might be difficult since SVG is somewhat generic). It is interconvertable to GXL as well (an XML-based graphics format).

Cheers,
Glen Low, Pixelglow Software
www.pixelglow.com

Animusic...

[antdude]

You can get the DVD and video clips from Animusic to see the ATI Animusic's Pipe Dream Demo. Also, ATI has the demo if you have an high-end ATI video card which is better because you can control the camera view IIRC!

Re:best "inspiration"

[MinutiaeMan]

Oh god, not this again...

1. Widgets were not invented for Konfabulator.
2. Widgets as a layer of the desktop was not invented for Konfabulator.
3. Widgets as an Exposé layer was only implemented in Konfabulator last Friday, pointing to parallel development rather than a ripoff.

All this hubbub about Apple supposedly ripping off of Konfabulator is bullshit. Konfabulator doesn't have a monopoly on the idea, and from what I've heard from the developers themselves, Dashboard is going to be at least partially different from Konfabulator. Not to mention that the idea of little programs called "Widgets" have been around for years.

But if the Konfabulator developers would rather moan and whine instead of develop a better product, then that's fine by me. I know better.

Re:best "inspiration"

[X_Caffeine]

it was a joke, you tools. lighten up.

Re:best "inspiration"

[MinutiaeMan]

If that was supposed to be a joke, then it was in poor taste. I'm sick of seeing Apple getting blamed for just doing their job -- developing better software.

Your post was basically propagating the popular myth that's floating around from paranoid and indignant developers about a product that hasn't even been released yet.

Re:best "inspiration"

[hunterx11]

I would use Konfabulator but I prefer GNOME to KDE.

Re:Dupe!

[zbrimhall]

And yea, the lord spaketh, and he saith with a violent, soul crushing cry of justice: RTFA!!!

SVG support.

[torpor]

I want one with full SVG support (load and save) ... can Cyto do that yet?

Re:SVG support.

[rowanxmas]

it can export to SVG, loading would be a little tricky since there are no formal definitions of what constitutes nodes and edges in SVG.

Re:best "inspiration"

[GlockToTheHead]

I'm sick of seeing Apple getting blamed for just doing their job -- developing better software.

Didn't microsoft say something similar when they were trying to defend having IE intergrated with the OS?

If you think that your statment is any different then you deserve a glock to the head.

Re:best "inspiration"

[MinutiaeMan]

Apple is different because Apple is not a convicted monopolist. And besides, in the IE court case, the issue was using Internet Explorer as an integrated part of the OS to the point where you couldn't get rid of it, whereas Dashboard is NOT integrated, it just uses many of the same components as other parts of the system. No one's going to be holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use Dashboard instead of Konfabulator. If Konfabulator is really that much better, then people will buy it anyway.

How do I know? I've got a paid license for OmniWeb 5, which I'm using instead of Safari. I bought the license for OmniWeb because I tried it out and decided that it was better than the free browser that Apple ships with the OS.

Re:best "inspiration"

[Gogo Dodo]

John Gruber has written a very insightful piece about Dashboard vs. Konfabulator. I suggest you go read it.