Apple Design Awards 2008 Celebrating the best in iPhone and Mac application development.
The Apple Design Awards, held at Moscone West during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, recognize technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in software development. With new categories for iPhone development, this year’s Apple Design Awards will be more exciting than ever.
Winners by Category
iPhone Developer Showcase
Best iPhone Game
Enigmo 1.0
Pangea Software, Inc.
Enigmo for iPhone is a 3D puzzle game where players construct mechanisms to direct lasers, plasma, and water to toggle switches, deactivate force-fields, and eventually get them to their final destination. Originally the most unique game that Pangea Software ever created on Mac OS X, the new iPhone version brings the concept to a whole new dimension by taking full advantage of iPhone’s Multi-Touch interface for dragging and manipulating puzzle pieces, zooming in and out, and operating game controls. With gorgeous 3D scenes rendered with OpenGL ES and amazing 3D audio produced by Open AL, Enigmo 1.0 for iPhone delivers a phenomenally engaging and addictive game play experience to iPhone and iPod touch.
Best iPhone Healthcare & Fitness Application
MIM 1.0 (alpha)
MIMVista, Corp.
MIM for iPhone is a revolutionary medical imaging application that provides multi-planar reconstruction of fused data sets such as PET/CT, which are crucial in diagnosing cancer. MIM lets physicians retrieve patient images wirelessly on their iPhone or iPod touch, manipulate and adjust them using simple gestures to isolate crucial pieces of data, and gather important data for a patient diagnosis on their rounds. MIM’s features include true dynamic multi-modality image fusion, multi-planar volumetric image reconstruction, linear measurement tools, Quantitative Standardized Uptake Value ROI, fusion blending between PET/CT and PET/MR, and display of PET, CT, MR, and Nuclear Medicine images. MIM takes advantage of technologies including Core Animation, Foundation/Core Foundation, UIKit, WebKit, and the accelerometer.
Best iPhone Social Networking Application
Twitterrific 1.0 (beta)
The Iconfactory
Twitterrific is an iPhone version of the Iconfactory’s popular desktop application of the same name and is a perfect match for iPhone’s capabilities and innovative user experience. Designed specifically for iPhone, Twitterrific provides both high and low density views suited for different usage scenarios, one-handed operation optimizable for right or left-handed users, and an attractive and polished user interface that feels at home on iPhone. Twitterrific uses iPhone OS technologies extensively including Core Location to integrate geographic location and help people communicate their whereabouts, Core Animation for subtle animation effects to reinforce state changes, WebKit for the built-in browser view and integration with Safari, libxml to provide the fastest and most efficient parsing of XML data returned by the Twitter REST API, and integration with Maps making it easy for people to locate friends, family or co-workers.
Best iPhone Entertainment Application
AOL Radio 1.0
AOL LLC
AOL Radio brings mainstream streaming online radio to iPhone and iPod touch with over 200 AOL and 150 CBS radio stations. With a simple-to-use interface, AOL Radio is like an FM tuner for your iPhone. Written entirely in Cocoa, AOL Radio uses Core Location to determine a user’s location and offer the nearest local radio stations from a nationwide footprint. Reliable audio streaming and improved battery life are achieved by using AudioFileServices and AudioQueueServices, while SCNetwork manages the best narrowband or broadband streaming based on whether users are connected via EDGE or Wi-Fi.
Best iPhone Productivity Application
OmniFocus 1.0 (pre-release)
The Omni Group
Getting things done is simple with OmniFocus, a professional-grade personal information management tool utilizing a proven task-management methodology. Already a popular application for Mac OS X, the iPhone version of OmniFocus takes its powerful functionality mobile. OmniFocus for iPhone makes it easy to create and manage tasks, projects, and contexts on-the-go while staying completely in sync with your desktop via .Mac or WebDav. With the built-in iPhone-only geolocator, OmniFocus can also log photo snapshots of a user’s current location as well as recommend things to do nearby. Using iPhone OS technologies and services like Cocoa, SQLite, Core Location, Address Book framework, and iPhone camera, OmniFocus is a truly integrated, iPhone Human Interface compliant application that sets a great standard for others to follow.
Best iPhone Web Application
Winner
Remember The Milk
Remember The Milk is a popular online task management service, with over 500,000 users, targeted at both the consumer and business markets and available in 24 languages. Remember The Milk for iPhone & iPod touch delivers an iPhone-tailored user experience with smooth animated transitions between screens, portrait and landscape optimized displays, and outstanding integration with built-in iPhone applications like Maps, Mail, and Phone. Optimized for Safari on iPhone, Remember The Milk is a full-featured AJAX web application with a completely client-side architecture that efficiently communicates with the Remember The Milk service allowing extremely fast access to data over Wi-Fi or EDGE. RTM is built on HTML and CSS standards and takes advantage of specific Safari functionality such as CSS text-shadow, CSS border-radius, and Web Clips. Remember The Milk uses optimized HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images, only loads resources when and where they are needed, and uses SSL to provide security for logins — optionally allowing the entire application to be accessed via SSL for extra security. Remember The Milk also integrates with external programs and services such as iCal, Mac OS X Dashboard, Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, and more.
Runner-Up
The Associated Press
Best Mac OS X Leopard Application
Winner
Vara Software Limited
ScreenFlow captures and produces screencasts - narrated video recordings of the computer desktop. They’re a perfect way for software developers to show off their products and for teachers and trainers to create training videos. Among its numerous uses, ScreenFlow can capture and narrate over Keynote presentations to create online versions in addition to adding screen recordings, other QuickTime media (such as soundtracks or movies) and editing it all together into a completely professional presentation. Even groups of professional screencasters are using ScreenFlow to produce paid content for major applications.
The built-in editor allows for adding 3D zoom & pan effects, highlighting the area around the cursor and even accenting the foreground window. ScreenFlow is able to simultaneously record the desktop, a DV camera or the built-in iSight as well as microphone and computer audio. Specifically designed for Mac OS X Leopard, the application is written in Objective-C 2, using Garbage Collection, Core Data for its data model & object graph and taking advantage of Cocoa Bindings throughout the user interface.
At its heart, Core Animation powers the user experience. Audio waveform rendering is performed using NSOperationQueue and QTKit powers both the video capture side and playback of video files — H.264 being the default codec. OpenGL is used extensively for 3D effects, with Quartz Composer performing the mouse & keyboard visualization effects. Core Image is also an integrated part of the rendering pipeline, including blurring and compositing. In addition, the software includes Spotlight & QuickLook plug-ins as well as a number of Automator actions to script the recording.
Runner-Up
Bee Documents, Inc.
Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience
Winner
Orbicule BVBA
Working with scientific images has never been easier or more rewarding than with Macnification 1.0, the new scientific image management solution for Mac OS X Leopard. Analogous to an Aperture for digital microscopy, Macnification helps scientists, engineers, and academicians import, organize, annotate, analyze, modify, compare, and publish huge volumes of microscopic images in a wide variety of formats. Macnification takes advantage of the advanced capabilities and efficiencies of Objective-C 2.0 and leverages an abundance of Mac OS X frameworks, including Image Kit for image handling and display, Core Image for fast, non-destructive image modification, QTKit for the creation and display of time-lapse Quick Time movies, Core Animation for live-updating stack views, and Core Data for automatic data saving and the implementation of Macnification’s complex relational data model.
Macnification also goes the extra mile and integrates with numerous Mac OS X technologies allowing users to search for images using Spotlight, preview images using Quick Look, export image measurements to Numbers (and Excel), and back up their entire image library with Time Machine. What really puts Macnification over the top is its gorgeous, easy-to-use user interface. Closely adhering to Apple’s Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines, Macnification focuses on exactly what its audience needs, while surprising and delighting users with its subtle use of animation, appropriate use of transparency, and unwavering attention to aesthetic details.
Runner-Up
Werck BV