Fake Leopard Screenshot Winners Announced

by , 2:45 PM EDT, July 27th, 2006

Phill Ryu has announced the winners of his Fake Leopard Screenshot contest, which was judged by employees of Delicious Monster, The Iconfactory, and other developers. Prizes were more than US$1,000 per winner and were donated by 28 companies offering Macintosh software and services.

The winner was Eric Patterson, who submitted four screenshots detailing an improved Finder, iChat integration in Apple mail, syncable bookmarks in Safari, and more. Delicious Monster's Wil Shipley commented: "Finder peek is an awesome idea -- so awesome we used to have it in NeXTstep. It was called 'Image Filters' and the Workspace dynamically loaded them for custom file types. I'd love to see it come back." And Potion Factory's Andy Kim said: "Apple should hire this guy."

Second place went to Emmet Stackelberg, who envisioned touch screen support in Mac OS X v10.5, along with visual Safari tabs and Torrent download integration in iTunes and Safari. Mr. Shipley quipped: "Tablet computers always seem cool, and I admit I kind of want one, but I've noticed that the only people I've *ever* seen using them are either on Star Trek or work in the Microsoft marketing department."

Adam Shutsa, who showed off an improved Finder as well as a new application called iMeeting, scored third place. Runner-up went to Nathan Ziarek, Reuben Henriques, and Stephen Sciliano.

Apple has said it will demonstrate features from Leopard during CEO Steve Jobs' keynote to kick off its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco on Aug. 7. Noting the number of fake Leopard screenshots that were being passed off as supposedly real, Mr. Ryu decided earlier this month to have fun with the concept and create a contest around the idea.

One of Eric Patterson's entries