The Apple Design Award App Winners – Read All About Them Here
The Apple Design Awards 2011 recognize outstanding achievement and excellence in iPhone, iPad, and Mac app design. Each year, winning products set new standards for the developer community to follow. Read about what made this year’s winners stand out above the rest.
iPhone Award – Infinity Blade
This sword-fighting, action game was developed exclusively for iOS and offers an innovative user experience using a first-person sword-fighting mechanic. Amazing graphics, high production quality, and incredible performance with console level graphics create disbelief about what can be done on a mobile device. And Game Center integration and Game Center multi-player mode keeps players coming back.
iPhone Award – Golfscape GPS Rangefinder
Golfscape GPS Rangefinder is an augmented reality, visual golf rangefinder used by players to pinpoint positing on the golf course for accurate shot placement. It uses the compass to show position indicators and point to target, and offers superior use of the Camera, Gyroscope, and Accelerometer for an accurate, full 360-degree view of the course. Fast app switching between Golfscape and Golfshot allows you to keep score and view a top down 2D map of the hole being played. And background GPS keeps track of where you are on the course between shots – even when your iPhone is asleep or performing other tasks.
iPhone Award – Cut The Rope
Cut the Rope is an amazing physics puzzle game, representing a high quality, high production value, casual game. Its clean, simple design offers a straightforward and addictive game mechanic that works perfectly for the touch screen. Cut the Rope is a great example of strong game design paired with excellent iOS integration – using OpenGL, Multi-Touch, and Accelerometer. Cut the Rope is available only on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
iPad Award – dJay for iPad
A full-fledged DJ system, djay for iPad allows mixing of iPod music, live performances, and recorded mixes on a hyper-realistic turntable interface. It’s fully optimized for iOS 4 multitasking and background operation, and uses Core Audio for pristine sound quality and ultra-low latency, with support for popular audio formats like MP3 and AA. djay for iPad also uses AirPlay to stream mixes wirelessly to Apple TV, AirPort Express, or any AirPlay-supported speaker dock, AV receiver, or stereo system. It takes advantage of the high-performance, dual-core processor in iPad 2 for supreme quality and desktop-class features like Time-Stretching and higher precision audio analysis.
This app retails for $9.99 and you can pick it up here
iPad Award – Osmos for iPad
Osmos for iPad is a well designed, well executed "Asteroids meets lava lamp" game with elegant, physics-based gameplay, dreamlike visuals, and a minimalist, electronic soundtrack. It makes great use of OpenGL, and OpenAL, and Multi-Touch on iPad. Its Multi-Touch controls work very well with the physical nature of the game (mass propulsion, zooming, time-warping, etc.) while offering maximum simplicity and immersion. Osmos for iPad has garnered rave reviews and is available on iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac.
iPad Award – Our Choice
Our Choice is an incredibly simple to use, entirely Multi-Touch gesture driven, interactive book app. It mixes narrative with photography, animations, video, and data-rich interactive graphics, and uses UIKit and Core Animation extensively to deliver a very tactile, compelling, and immediate user experience without any user interface. Written from scratch on iOS, Our Choice sets a high bar for simplicity and appeal for other apps in the same genre.
Mac App Award – Capo
Capo is a powerful, modern tool that helps you learn to perform your favorite music using the original recording. You can adjust the pitch of the song to learn it in a different key or tune it to your instrument, detect chords in realtime without pre-analysis, set up a loop to practice difficult passages and save your loops, markers, pitch, and speed settings so you can pick up where you left off. Capo offers a gorgeous visual design and fantastic integration with Mac OS X technologies including Cocoa, Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, and Core Audio.
Mac App Award – Pixelmator
A beautifully designed, easy-to-use and powerful image editor for Mac OS X, Pixelmator uses all of the latest Mac OS X technologies, including Cocoa, 64-Bit, OpenGL, Core Image, iSight, Media Browser, Automator, Quartz Composer, and more. It integrates with Aperture, iPhoto, and PhotoBooth and offers web export options to Flickr, Facebook and Picasa. Pixelmator brings fun and ease of use back to this category of software.
Mac App Award – Anomaly Warzone Earth
Anomaly Warzone Earth is a great, new tower offense game for Mac with gorgeous graphics and great special effects through extensive use of OpenGL shaders and high-performance tuning. It offers great strategy and action and is currently one of the newest and most impressive games on the Mac App Store.
Student Developer Showcase – Grades 2
Grades 2 was developed by Jeremy Olson while he was a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A self taught iOS developer, he started coding in his sophomore year and did all of the design and development for Grades 2 – a GPA calculator for students with intuitive user interface and high quality graphics. It integrates nicely with iOS technologies including iAd, In-App Purchase, UIKit, Retina Display, and Multi-Touch. It includes due date notification for assignments, and a calendar and drop grade feature to track GPA progress for individual courses and overall GPA.
Student Developer Showcase – Pennant
Stephen Varga built Pennant as the main project for his Master’s thesis at Parsons The New School for Design. This fantastic baseball history app creates a view of baseball history through data visualizations of key statistics from over 115,000 games from 1952-2010. Built entirely with Cocoa touch and OpenGL, Pennant is available exclusively for iPad.
Student Developer Showcase – Pulse News
Pulse News is a beautiful news and social network browser that allows you to customize and add news from traditional sources, blogs and social networks, and view content offline. Developers Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta created Pulse News during a 10 week "launch pad" course at Stanford University.
This app is free and you can download it here – I must admit, I use this app everyday.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photography journalist, editor, curator, and the founder of *TheAppWhisperer.com*, one of the world’s leading platforms dedicated to mobile photography and art. Since its launch in 2009, TheAppWhisperer has become an international hub for artists of all levels to discover, learn, exhibit, and engage with contemporary photographic practice.Built on principles of inclusivity, accessibility, and artistic excellence, Joanne has spent almost two decades championing mobile photography as a serious artistic medium. Through interviews, critical essays, exhibitions, competitions, and education, she has helped shape and document the evolution of mobile art on a global scale.Her work has taken her internationally, lecturing on photography and mobile art at institutions and events including the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, alongside appearances in the UK and Europe. She has served as a juror for international photography and mobile art awards across Portugal, Canada, the United States, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.Joanne is also the founder of *TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com*, one of the first online galleries dedicated exclusively to collectible mobile art, connecting artists with collectors across Europe, the United States, and Asia.Before founding TheAppWhisperer, Joanne worked extensively in print journalism and photographic publishing, including roles at a paparazzi photo agency and as deputy editor of a leading photography magazine. Her freelance journalism, criticism, and commentary have been published widely in both the UK and the US, with bylines in *The Times*, *The Sunday Times*, *The Guardian*, *Popular Photography*, *NikonPro*, *DPReview*, *Which?*, *Vogue Italia*, *LensCulture*, the *BBC*, and more recently, the *Financial Times*, where her published letters on photography continue to contribute to wider conversations around the medium.Alongside her editorial and curatorial work, Joanne’s own photographic practice has been exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, South Korea, and the United States. Her work increasingly explores themes of grief, loss, death, memory, and the body.Her current research interests centre on grief, death, and poverty, with forthcoming postgraduate study leading towards doctoral research in these areas.Joanne is currently developing new long-form writing and photographic projects and is available for commissions, editorial projects, speaking engagements, and collaborations.Contact: joannetheappwhisperer@gmail.com)
