The Apple Design Awards, now in their 12th year, recognise technical excellence and outstanding achievement in Mac OS X software design and development. There are seven categories: Leopard Application, User Experience, Developer Tool, Game, Scientific Computing Solution, Dashboard Widget and Student Product.

The winners and runners-up in each category were announced at a special awards ceremony at the Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference, held at Moscone West, San Francisco, on Tuesday 12 June 2007.

SingleCrystal is a unique program that leverages the outstanding graphics and ease-of-use of Mac OS X to provide an accessible and fun way for students, educators and researchers to understand complex, three-dimensional diffraction patterns from crystals.

Although a relatively-specialised program, SingleCrystal provides a key showcase for Mac OS X technologies including fast Quartz graphics, PDF export, QuickTime import/export, Apple Events, Core Foundation XML/HTTP, Help Viewer and of course the full Aqua user experience.

SingleCrystal's simulation is highly-realistic and the mouse-driven real-time control gives users a real sense of exploring "diffraction space" in a way that transcends traditional laboratory work, and brings a new sense of empowerment to this important area of analytical science.

As an education tool, SingleCrystal adds the ability to control experimental parameters such as crystal thickness, machine beam current and wavelength, to show how these affect the formation of a diffraction pattern. Diffraction patterns can also be colorized to display the true "phases" of diffracted beams - something that no real experiment can do, but the understanding of which is crucial to the investigation of crystal structures.

The software is also unique in providing interactive "stereographic projections", showing the spatial arrangements of planes of atoms and vectors in a crystal lattice, summarized in a handy two-dimensional plot.