First Macsimum Award winners announced

Posted by Dennis Sellers Jan 14, 2005 at 12:45am

Macsimum News is happy to announce the 10 winners of the first Macsimum Awards, which will be presented today at the Macworld Conference & Expo. We’re awarding the 10 coolest products (“coolest” being left open to interpretation by the Macsimum gang). To be nominated for the award, products had to be announced at this week’s MWSF or have begun shipping this week. Without further ado, here are the winners:

° The Mac mini. Apple has finally taken the plunge into the low-end computer niche with the most affordable and compact Mac ever. Starting at just US$499, the Mac mini is just two inches tall and weighs only 2.9 pounds. Despite its diminutive size, it packs a lot of punch with Mac OS X and iLife ‘05.

° The iPod shuffle. In another surprising entry into the low-price market, Apple has actually undercut most of its competition with this device, which starts at $99. There was actually some debate among the Macsimum gang about this device since the iPod shuffle lacks a display, but the majority of our crew felt it was a definite winner.

° TextWrangler. Bare Bones Software released TextWrangler 2.0, a major upgrade to its general purpose text editor. The update introduces syntax coloring, function navigation for eight new languages and assortment of feature additions and improvements. And it’s free.

° Webstractor. Updated to version 1.1, this SoftChaos product automatically captures Web pages as you browse them, letting you save a document that contains all Web pages in a browsing session. You can also edit your captured Web pages. It’s a great time saving product that costs $79 for the downloadable version and $99 for the retail version.

° The OS X Keyboard. Matias’ OS X Keyboard is a $39.95 keyboard designed for Mac OS X that labels special characters on the keys as such menu shortcuts aren’t always clear. It’s another great time saver.

° The SmartDeck from Griffin Technology is a “cassette adapter with a brain.” It lets you control your iPod using the built-in controls of your car’s cassette player, unlike competing products. The SmartDeck will be available later this quarter for $24.95.

° The JBL Encounter. They were first announced last year but the JBL Encounter from Harman Multimedia are finally shipping. The $199.95, 2.1 speaker system sounds good and looks great. It consists of a 34-watt subwoofer with 13-watt satellites. The spaceship-like subwoofer uses Magnum technology, while the alien-looking speakers are compatible with your Mac, iPod, other digital music players and CD players.

° The ProSticks. Guess we’re just suckers for cool speakers, but the ProSticks from MacMice not only look cool, but they’re some of the best-looking computer speakers we’ve ever heard. The ProSticks are a$349 sound system with an iPod mini-like design and sport a mini-jack so they can be used with a variety of devices. The speakers will ship later this quarter.

° The PURE card. Advanced Rendering Technologies (ART) VPS showcased their first Mac product this week and it was a doozy. The PURE accelerated rendering hardware speeds up ray tracing work to an amazing degree. The PCI card isn’t cheap (it starts at $3,300), but for power users in certain graphics areas, it will be a must-have.

° The Radeon X800 XT card. ATI introduced an incredibly powerful graphics card in a relatively slim form factor. It’s targeted to both high-end gamers and Apple 30-inch Cinema Display customers. For the latter, it offers a single-slot solution whereas the Nvidia cards needed to drive the monstrously big monitor take up two PCI slots. The graphics card features 16 pixel pipelines, six vertex pipelines and 256MB of GDDR3 memory. It has a manufacturers suggested retail price of US$499.

Actually, we presented an 11th award as well – to ProSoft for their new Drive Genius application. We found that the $99 product had such a great assortment of tools for strorage and hard disk management they also deserved a nod.

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