We're quite proud to announce that Sandvox 1.2 was awarded runner-up in the 2007 Apple Design Awards for the category of "Best Mac OS X User Experience."
We are at Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) this week, where each year only a few applications are chosen from a huge pool of entries for several categories, including User Experience, Games, Scientific, Widgets, Developer Tools, and Leopard application.
Each year, Apple packs the house with a glitzy show, not quite as big as the Academy Awards in Hollywood, but certainly a grand event in the Macintosh world. Before the winners were announced this year, they presented an immersive slideshow featuring winners of the awards since 2001; it was great to see Watson (a winner in 2002) there — and to hear the applause when it appeared onscreen! Then the winners and runner-ups in each category were announced. They saved the User Experience category (by far the most competitive) for last, which just added to our tension! When they announced our application as runner-up, the three Karelians (Terrence, Dan, and our newest engineer Mike) ran up on stage to collect and admire our cube-shaped trophy as one of the presenters gave a very nice description of our application and why it was chosen. The winner of this category, incidentally, was Coda from Panic, a beautiful program that is also used for building websites (but geared to a much more technical audience than Sandvox). Congratulations to all the winners; it's certainly worthwhile for all Mac users to look at the full list of awards and try out the applications.