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Apple Design Award Winners Announced

Posted by pudge on from the next-year-Dashboard-widgets-will-take-most-of-these-awards dept.

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."

6 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Design == form over function? by hunterx11 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    English is easier said than done.
    1. Re:Design == form over function? by undef24 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:Design == form over function? by hunterx11 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
  2. This Year's Candidates by MinutiaeMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:best "inspiration" by MinutiaeMan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.
  4. Re:best "inspiration" by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 3, Informative

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