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Press Release: May 9, 2003

Mac OS X Innovators Contest Open for Entries: Creators of NetNewsWire and Spring Win First Round of Awards

Sebastopol, CA--O'Reilly & Associates is accepting entries for Round Two of the Mac OS X Innovators Contest. The contest, sponsored by Apple Developer Connection (ADC), seeks innovative Mac OS X applications, plug-ins, user interface widgets, or other creative original software. Entries are judged on ease of use, adherence to the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines, use of Mac OS X technologies, and last, but definitely not least, innovation.

First prize, worth nearly $5000, is an ADC Premier membership, a full pass to the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, CA (October 27-30, 2003), and a one-year subscription to O'Reilly's premium online book service, Safari. Entries must be submitted to http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/developer/entry.html by June 16, 2003. The Round Two winners will be announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon, July 7-11, 2003.

Round One of the Mac OS X Innovators Contest wrapped up with the announcement of the winners at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on April 24. Brent Simmons's NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire) and Robb Beal's Spring (http://www.usercreations.com/spring/) were chosen from a field of over 100 entries. Simmons and Beal's applications were installed on all the computers in the conference's ADC-sponsored Rendezvous Lounge so conference attendees could experience them first-hand.

"We had a reception for Brent and Robb Thursday night at ETech, with Apple Developer Connection providing some excellent food and drinks," said Derrick Story, Mac DevCenter managing editor. "What a blast! At one point I looked over and saw Brent jawing with a group of developers while Rob was demoing Spring for conference attendees. I'm already looking forward to OSCON and our Mac OS X conference."

Winner NetNewsWire is a popular RSS news reader for Mac OS X that fetches and displays news from thousands of different web sites via an intuitive user interface that builds on the elegance and power of Mac OS X. The full version includes a weblog editor, Internet scrapbook, advanced search functionality, and is AppleScriptable.

Runner-up Spring is a unique, web-inspired desktop for the Mac OS X platform. Users work with canvases and icons (called Spring Objects) to retrieve and manage information, and to communicate with others. Wildly innovative yet easy to use, Spring exemplifies the creative possibilities inherent in Mac OS X.

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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