This week we have the first nominees for the Gearhead Awards. "What awards?" you might ask. Ah, glad you asked.

It is our intention to find, with your help, the bestest of the bestest products. There will be one overall gold medal winner in software and hardware categories, as well as silver and bronze medalists. The winning products will be selected by some really smart judges (yet to be pressed into service), and we expect to announce the nominees in December, with the winner to be declared in January.

All nominated products must be fully released (no betas), and they must be off-the-shelf packages.

Drop a line to ga@gibbs.com for a nomination form. You can send in as many nominations as you like, and two randomly selected readers who nominate the winner in each class will receive a fabulous prize of some kind. So, as they say in mainstream politics: Vote early and vote often!

The first of our nominees is a tool called JAlbum that creates amazing Web photo albums. What impressed us were its well-designed user interface, huge feature set, software flexibility and extensibility, and remarkable robustness. Oh, and it is free.

Programmed in Java (for Java 1.4 or above) by David Ekholm, JAlbum runs on Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX and OS/2.

At its simplest JAlbum arranges a collection of image files according to the specifications of a template, or skin, as a set of static HTML files and subdirectories of images.

JAlbum uses a simple, tabbed interface. On the main page you specify the basics, including the subdirectories and/or individual image files to include (you also can drag and drop files and subdirectories from the operating system's file browser), select the output directory, specify image sizes for thumbnail and full-sized images, define which ordering to use (name, date and so on), select how images should be linked, and choose which skin to use.

JAlbum supports JPEG, GIF and PNG formats. Other formats such as TIFF, BMP and JPEG2000 can be added through Sun's Java Advanced Imaging Image I/O Tools plug-in.

A number of skins are included with the JAlbum distribution, and others are downloadable for free from the amazing JAlbum Skin Repository. Check out the Chameleon and BananAlbum skins. The JAlbum site explains how to create a skin, including BeanShell scripts to aid in album construction, client-side scripting, flash components, and a huge range of variables that can be substituted into placeholders to be used in labeling or configuring the output. JAlbum skins also can define new tabs and dialogs in the JAlbum interface so extra output control can be easily added and accessed.