Apple Announces iPhone Winners of the Apple Design Awards

On the second night of it’s 2009 World Wide Developer Conference, Apple announced the winners of the this years Apple Design Awards. The winners are split amongst the Mac and iPhone applications submitted by their developers for the competition. Winning applications are considered to be the pinnacle of design and user experience and recognize technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement. This year’s iPhone application winners along with their award descriptions are:

iPhone Developer Showcase

MLB.com At Bat 2009 version 1.0.1 from MLB.com (app info)

MLB At Bat 2009 is an innovative, highly connected app that sets a great standard for all other iPhone sports apps to follow.

At Bat 2009 is the fastest, most detailed way to follow baseball on an iPhone or iPod touch. Users can listen live to every regular and postseason game with no blackout restrictions, see real-time scores, play highlights, and stream audio of all games At Bat 2009 uses MediaPlayer for in-game video highlights, AudioToolbox for streaming audio, QuartzCore, CoreGraphics, UIKit, and Core Animation to optimize the user experience, SQLite for data caching and tracking video view history, and SystemConfiguration for reach-ability.

Postage version 1.0.1 from Rogue Sheep (app info)

Postage sets a new standard for attractiveness and ease of use in an iPhone app.

With Postage you create and send beautiful, personalized digital postcards using the built-in camera and Photo Library. Core Animation provides smooth transitions and eye-catching effects while Quartz provides high quality graphics, effects, and text display. With 3G/Edge/Wi-Fi networking, you have connectivity virtually everywhere. And you can easily select recipients of your Postage postcards with Address Book integration.

Topple 2 version 1.1 from ngmoco:) (app info)

Topple 2 is an ideal model for excellent iPhone game and game sequel design, technology adoption, performance, connectedness, and localization.

Topple 2 combines the features of multitouch and the accelerometer to create a game about stacking blocks and keeping them from toppling over. Local WiFi multiplayer mode enables game play between two players, and a challenge mode where recorded sessions can be sent to others players via email, twitter or facebook. Localized for English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, Topple 2 uses multiple iPhone SDK technologies including UIKit, OpenGL ES, Bonjour, CFNetwork, Multi-Touch, Accelerometer, Email, and Twitter and Facebook integration.
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Twitterrific 2.0 is a well made update to the critically acclaimed, 2008 Apple Design Award winning, Twitter app. The app is definitely geared more towards the Twitter power user, but it has enough charm to delight the masses. If Iconfactory addresses just a couple of issues in the near future, Twitterrific could become my Twitter app of choice (or at least in my 3 app rotation).

While major publishers work to port their blockbuster games to the iPhone, it’s the indie developers that are paving the way to the platform’s strong suits. Eliss brings innovation as well as targeted controls to the playing field, but how well does it actually deliver?

Independent Games Festival Mobile Winners Announced – iPhone Sweeps!

The IGF Mobile awards were announced at the Game Developers Conference this week, and the iPhone, less than a year after commercial games became available for it, swept the awards winning all categories.

In celebration of these awards and due to extra publicity by Apple in the App Store, have reduced their prices to help increase sales for the nominated applications. Here’s a rundown of the winners:

Best Mobile Game – Fieldrunners
(on sale for $2.99, down from $4.99 iTunes Link)

Best iPhone Game – Zen Bound
($4.99 iTunes Link)

Innovation in Game Design – Galcon
(on sale for $0.99, down from $4.99 iTunes Link)

Mobile Achievement in Art – Fieldrunners
(on sale for $2.99, down from $4.99 iTunes Link)

Technical Achievement Award – Real Racing
(Not yet released – target release date: late April, 2009)

Mobile Audio Achievement – Zen Bound
($4.99 iTunes Link)

I’m not a scientist or medical professional so I can’t attest to all of Papers’ merits, but I can tell you that it appears to be a robust app that comes with a fine pedigree: The OS X version of Papers won a 2007 Apple Design Award for best scientific application for the Mac. Since Papers for the iPhone syncs with the OS X version, it allows you to leverage scientific research already in hand and also includes several search engines so you can not only take your research library with you on the go, but also add to it.

Nomination Report for 2008 Best App Ever Awards

With nominations being open for just under a week, we have now received over 5,000 nominations in the 2008 Best App Ever Awards. Haven’t nominated your favorite apps yet? Head on over to http://bestappever.com and get moving, nominations are open until 12/30.

This inaugural competition is the first iPhone OS Application achievement awards to recognize the best iPhone apps and games released in the iTunes App Store in 2008. The goal is to help publicize the very best apps available, not just the best-selling apps.

Nominations are still tight with it being a pretty open race in all of the categories as it stands right now. Especially so with the Best App Ever race — less than 75 nominations separate the #1 from the #10 nominee.

Here’s how some of the nominations break down as of 12/22 12:00pm Pacific:

Total nominations: 5,079
Total apps nominated: 725

Category with most nominations: Most Useful App
Category with least nominations: Free Or Ad Supported Game

Category with most apps nominated: Most Innovative App
Category with the least apps nominated: Best Racing Game

Tightest category (least # of nominations separate #1-#10): Best 99 Cent Game
Widest category (most # of nominations separate #1-#10): Best Casual Game

We’ll post here again to let you know the final nominees and when voting is open on 12/31.

Announcing the 2008 Best App Ever Awards

148apps.com is proud to announce the launch of the 2008 Best App Ever Awards. A new site to allow you to nominate the apps and games you best love for over 30 awards including the title Best App Ever. We want to honor the best in iPhone apps and games, not just the best selling.

The awards are now open to receive nominations for apps and games. Nominations end on December 30th.

Once all nominations are totaled, verified, and calculated, we’ll take the top 5 nominated from the site and combine those with 5 nominations from the list of bloggers, developers, and industry people we have been contacting about these awards. That will give us 10 nominations for each category. In addition, the 10 apps that get the most votes across all categories will compete for the title of Best App Ever.

On December 31st we’ll post the nominees for all categories and voting will start. Winners will be announced on January 7th, 2009 at the MacWorld Expo.

Head on over to http://bestappever.com to nominate your favorite apps.