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
[img id="icon100x100.png"]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.
[img id="icon100x100.png"]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.
[img id="icon100x100.png"]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.
[img id="icon100x100.png"]Tweetie version 1.3.1 from atebits LLC (app info)
With its companion Mac OS X application, Tweetie is a stellar example of an iPhone app that's designed to do one thing extremely well using all the appropriate technologies.
As Twitter undergoes explosive growth, Tweetie has grown with it to become the de-facto way to use Twitter on iPhone. With its simple interface that leverages UI standards, and its blend of power features, Tweetie is an app that provides a great experience for every level of user. It utilizes many of the frameworks that make iPhone unique, such as Core Location and Core Animation. And Tweetie is currently the only Twitter client to be localized in multiple languages - you can use Tweetie natively in English, German, Japanese, and Russian.
Best Student Developed iPhone App
[img id="icon100x100.png"]Wooden Labyrinth 3D version 1.2.1 from Elias Pietil (app info)
Wooden Labyrinth 3D is an excellent example of innovative software written by a student.
Wooden Labyrinth 3D is an iPhone labyrinth game which uses the accelerometer to control gravity, to jump the ball, and to affect perspective distortion on-screen. The power of OpenGL ES is harnessed to create a real life looking labyrinth board which alters it's perspective based on the tilt of the iPhone causing the board to seem as if it's popping off the screen. The iPhone networking capabilities are used to connect to a level editor and to download user-created levels. Wooden Labyrinth 3D is an excellent example of an innovative iPhone app written by a student.
Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App
AccuTerra version 1.0.0 Beta from AccuTerra (developers site)
AccuTerra for iPhone is an excellent example of an app that brings unique functionality to iPhone through use of iPhone OS 3.0 technologies.
AccuTerra uses many iPhone OS 3.0 beta technologies including StoreKit to allow In-app purchase of maps, Push Notification for notifying friends of new hikes, OpenGLES and MapKit to render high fidelity maps, Audio toolbox for custom sounds, clicks, vibrations and chime, CoreLocation for the GPS functionality allowing users to record their adventures, UIKit, Core Animation, and SQlite3.0 to store hikes, places and points, photos, and other user-generated data.
Congratulations to all of the winners!