PerversionTracker Design Awards 2004 Winners

At this time, we are pleased to announce the winners of the 2004 PerversionTracker Design Awards. The winners depicted here are: the best of the best; the cream of the crop; the semicolons amongst the commas. They have outshone their many competitors in countless ways — ways that may or may not involve gifts of cash. The decision to select these five entries for distinction was made easier (in three cases) by the attendance of said competitors at the actual awards ceremony. Note to future competitors: We hate shipping prizes.

Best Use of Real Ultimate Power

War Extreme 2005

Author of such titles as War, War Extreme 1.0 and War Extreme 2.0, Kynan Shook (attending), shocked the PerversionTracker community with his stunning new entry: War Extreme 2005. While some would perhaps consider Kynan a misguided soul for tying up the G5 optimization lab with his continual efforts to improve on his previous best “hands per second” benchmark, we applaud the attempt. Others may lambaste him for his singular obsession with becoming a disciple of PerversionTracker; sadly we must concur.

Although Kynan was unable to afford the additional airfare needed to transport his magnificent mullet, which — we are told — sometimes glistens in the sun, we are pleased to provide an accompanying accessory for when he returns home. A brand spankin’ new set of Redneck Teeth:

Download War Extreme 2005

Best Misuse of Technology

iSMRT

Cunningly assembled by Jay Jones and Ian Baxter (attending), iSMRT attempts to liven up your writing by randomly replacing words with their thesaurus “equivalents,” theoretically making the author appear to be brighter than they really are. While we, being capable wordsmiths, have no use for such second-rate mechanical machinations, our readership is encouraged to make use of this outstanding product for their future hate mail and love letters.

In recognition of the sophistication of their linguistic analysis, we award JJ & IB a pair of unremittingly lust-invoking nerd glasses:

Download iSMRT

Best Torture of Users

24clock

Perhaps we had best let the author explain this one:

My application is a fully fledged Cocoa project packed with exciting features and technologies. It was inspired by the popular television series “24”, which features, at convenient intervals, an onscreen digital clock counting the seconds away as time passes within the exciting “24” world, the most interesting feature of this clock is surely the vast mechanical crashing sound it makes as each second ticks by — a feature sorely neglected by most available clocks on the market.

Although this premise may seem rather drab, once one sets the clock into “Twinkly” mode, and witnesses the sheer volume of sounded emitted from the normally feeble TiBook speakers, one realizes that Mr. Peter Laurens has a special talent for causing one’s listening apparatus to flee through the most convenient orifice.

For this triumph of timetelling, an achivement rivaled only by the invention of the grease drip clock, we are pleased to present Peter Laurens with a much-needed accessory to his face:

Download 24clock

Best Drawers

iWhackEm

Despite the fact that the developers of iWhackEm, Karl Seamon and Jonathan Polley, neglected to properly communicate their desire to win to the PerversionTracker judges, and didn’t even show up at the awards ceremony, the amazingness of their entry overshadows such concerns.

Featuring no less than four different drawers, each resplendently decorated with a drawing of a helpfully labeled mole, iWhackEm is, simply put, a masterpiece in the arena of whack-a-mole gaming. The only improvement we could suggest would be a special “magical badger” mode, replacing the moles with flying penguins that quickly make good their escape whenever a whacking threatens. Much like the Hardy Boys of yore, these penguins would have a variety of criminal detection and avoidance methods at their disposal; primary among these would be the “lock pick under the wing” trick. Also, smelling salts would have to be flourished on a regular basis.

Oh yes. Before we forget: heh heh… he said “seamon”… heh heh… No prize is offered for iWhackEm, because Seamon should be his own reward.

Download iWhackEm

Best Application That Is Not Really An Application

We will let Vaska Zzivanovic’s design skills (and phonebook-friendly name) speak for themselves:

In the spirit of Mr. Zzivanovic’s effort to produce an application without actually writing one, we award this virtual prize: a lovely picture of a grison. A native of South America, this surly mustelid feasts on carcasses whenever possible. It also enjoys long walks, the sonnets of William Shakespeare and swift bites to the back of the neck.

AND FINALLY THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

Best in Show

ChocoCompendium

Jeremy Dronfield’s tender concern for the user was apparent as soon as we noticed his use of the industry-standard ”.dmg.tgz.zip.sit.tbz.sit.hqx” compression format. His careful regard for human interface guidelines is matched only by a keen sense of product marketing.

ChocoCompendium is comprised of five distinct applications, which we will enumerate below, accompanied by Mr. Dronfield’s bacterially-compromised Read Me material:

WindowTidy

Ever get tired of shovelling through layers of windows, trying to find the one you want? Even Exposé doesn’t always solve the problem - those windows just flip right back, as messy as they were before. WindowTidy is a revelation of lateral thinking; it circumvents the problem by whacking up a single screen-size floating window that hides everything. Just choose Tidy Windows from the menu, and… no more mess!

We did think of making the screening window a nice restful shade of grey, in order to add to the feeling of satisfaction at hiding all those troublesome windows. Then we thought what the hell, and made it a really eye-peeling tomato red.

Crash

Crash is an application with only one function - to get the hell out as quickly as possible. Think of all the apps you’ve tried which “quit unexpectedly”. Why not try one which quits completely and totally expectedly all the time?

Herring Sandwich

Herring Sandwich is an exercise in futility. Try and get the herring sandwich… Oh, it’s gone! Try and get the herring sandwich… Oh, it’s gone! Try again… Oh - you get the picture. A carefully plagiarized reconstruction of the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted by the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious, Herring Sandwich is calculated to keep you in a rapture of blissed-out entertainedness for 23.7 seconds before the onset of potentially lethal brain-lump accumulation.

AppSuicide

Like all our software, AppSuicide has only one function. Click the button, and the application neatly places itself in the Trash and quits.

Linguist

Pit your lexicographical skills against the computer in this brain-curdling word game. Using the clues not provided, work out what word the computer is thinking of. The game is made easier by the fact that Linguist only knows three words, but harder by its inability to spell. Also, Linguist is in charge of the scoreboard, and cheats. (There is a secret way for you to cheat. Unfortunately, Linguist knows all about it, and is prepared…) Linguist has three difficulty levels, and manages to be equally unwinnable on all of them. After a few rounds of Linguist, you may want to install and run AppSuicide (see above).

For all this, and more, we are thrilled to award the gift of flight to our previously gravity-laden friend: the common chicken. Yes, Jeremy Dronfield will be receiving his very own Chicken Chucker:

Download ChocoCompendium

Wrap-up

Thanks to all who submitted their entries this year, and to the attendees, who were unflaggingly polite, and always remembered not to guzzle the contents of the mini-bar.

The audience thrills to the presentational stylings of Mr. Ladd Van Tol

Posted by ladd at July 5, 2004 04:58 PM | TrackBack