Marketing Unit
Top software design award for Apple Zac
June 18, 2007A software program written by 19-year-old Macquarie University student Zac Cohan has received an Apple Design Award for ‘Best Student Product' at the 2007 Apple WorldWide Developers Conference held last week in San Francisco.
The Apple Design Awards, now in their 12th year, recognise technical excellence and outstanding achievement in Mac operating system software design and development. Entries are judged on a variety of criteria, including platform innovation, user experience, technology adoption, performance optimisation, use of open source, automation and sharing and integration.
Judged superior to hundreds of other student entries, ‘Picturesque' allows users to beautify their images for the Web with a variety of effects, even enabling the beautification of a whole folder of images in a batch with a single click.
The program was developed by Cohan and UNSW student Nik Youdale, using a grant from the Apple University Consortium, which aims to enhance and increase computing technology on campus, provide low-cost computing to the University community and, in conjunction with Apple, further develop Apple products and share experiences amongst other tertiary education institutions.
Remarkably, Cohan and Youdale, are both self-taught programmers who only learnt Apple's programming language last year.
"It kinda reminds you that anyone really can write an award-winning application and you don't need any specific background in computer science," said Cohan.
As winners of an Apple Design Award, Cohan and Youdale each receive a MacBook Pro as well as a ticket to next year's Developers Conference and a booth at MacWorld San Francisco in January 2008.
Any enquiries from the media should be directed to:
Greg Welsh phone: (02) 9850 7383
email address: greg.welsh@mq.edu.au
Back to the news archive