Following its WWDC keynote yesterday, Apple held its annual design awards, which honor a select few apps for iOS and OS X that showcase outstanding design and innovation. Here are all the winners.
Shadowmatic — iOS, Triada Studio
Shadowmatic is an “ornately crafted and imaginative puzzle game” in which players must position abstract objects to find recognizable silhouettes in projected shadows. Apple says it was selected for its attention to detail, high-fidelity rendering, excellent execution, and for its implementation of multi-touch gestures.
Metamorphabet — iOS, Vectorpark, Inc.
Metamorphabet is an app designed to teach children the alphabet using beautifully animated letters that offer a playful and interactive learning experience. It won its Apple Design Award for its outstanding creativity, convincing physics, smooth animations, and exploratory design.
Robinhood — iOS, Robinhood Markets, Inc.
Robinhood is an innovative stock trading app that takes a unique approach to social investing. It’s designed to be the best mobile stock-tracking tool on iOS, with clean, content-centric design and beautiful typography. It not only works on iPhone and iPad, but Apple Watch, too.
Affinity Designer — Mac, Serif (Europe) Ltd.
Affinity Designer is a high-performance graphics design app designed for creative professionals. It takes full advantage of OS X technologies like OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch, Core Graphics, and supports the Force Touch trackpad to let you draw and paint with pressure sensitivity.
Apple says Affinity Designer is “an excellent example of what a state-of-the-art Mac app should be.”
Download from the Mac App Store
Crossy Road — iOS, Hipster Whale Pty Ltd.
Crossy Road is the incredibly addictive arcade hopper that boasts beautiful 8-bit artwork, endless gameplay, and great sound design. It uses in-app purchases effectively to “add variety,” Apple says — not just to help players progress.
Fantastical 2 — Universal, Flexibits, Inc.
Flexibits is widely regarded as the best calendar app on iOS, OS X, and Apple Watch. It sports a stunning user interface, intelligent natural language interpretation, and lots of great features.
Fantastical wins its award for “its clean design, rich functionality, speed, responsiveness, support for popular localizations, and deep integration with OS X,” Apple says.
Workflow — iOS, DeskConnect, Inc.
Workflow is a unique automation tool that connects apps and actions together to automate the things you do frequently on your iOS devices. It was selected by Apple for its “outstanding use of iOS accessibility features” and “excellent implementation for VoiceOver with clearly labeled items, thoughtful hints, and drag/drop announcements.”
Does Not Commute — iOS, Mediocre AB
Does Not Commute is an strategic driving game for iOS in which players race against themselves in a “time traveller’s paradox.” They must avoid themselves while completing challenges, and the more they play, the more difficult the game becomes.
Does Not Commute was selected for its “highly stylize and beautiful late 1960s aesthetic, which is carried throughout every detail of the game.”
Vainglory — iOS, Super Evil Megacorp
Demoed at last year’s WWDC, Vainglory is a real-time online multiplayer battle arena designed specifically for touch devices. It was chosen by Apple for its “beautiful, high-fidelity graphics and animations,” which deliver a polished and immersive experience.
Pacemaker — iOS, Pacemaker Music AB
Pacemaker is the personal music mixing app, which lets you mix together your favorite tracks on your iOS devices. Apple praises its creative, minimalist visual design, realistic animations, and novel interactions.
Elementary Minute — iOS, Clemens Strasser (Student Winner)
Elementary Minute is a simple, fast-paced quiz game in which players must quickly swipe up or down to indicate whether the statement displayed on their device is true or false. It’s “clean, legible, and consistent,” Apple says, and has an Apple Watch companion app.
jump-O — Gabriel Mathias Rocha and Victor Lappas Giménez (Student Winner)
jump-O is a hand-drawn, minimalist puzzle game developed by Gabriel Mathias Rocha and Victor Lappas Giménez, who both learned to develop for iOS while they were students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná. jump-O “puts circle players into a square world in which they must struggle to survive by jumping and moving to avoid spikes and bullets.”
