The Apple Design Awards recognize technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development. Each year, winning products set new standards for usability, performance, technology integration and adoption. This year’s winners raise the bar even higher.
iPhone Developer Showcase
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.
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Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase
Billings is an excellent example of a highly usable localized application, designed specifically for Mac OS X and small business users. Billings is designed to manage time-tracking and expenses for small business users and produce gorgeous invoices. Billings is built on Cocoa, and integrates with Mail, Google Maps, and iCal. It supports F-Script for invoice design, produces cross-platform PDF invoices using Quartz, and leverages the Address Book framework. Billings is localized in English, French, German, Japanese and Dutch. A companion iPhone app is on the way.
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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.
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BoinxTV is an excellent example of usability, innovation, and broad Mac OS X Leopard technology adoption.
BoinxTV turns a Mac into a TV studio allowing the recording of shows, podcasts and events to create a live video signal that can be recorded to disk, played out in real time, or streamed to the Internet. BoinxTV makes extensive use of graphics and media technologies in Mac OS X including Quartz Composer, OpenGL, OpenGL Shader Language, QuickTime/QTKit, QTCapture, Core Audio, Core Video, Core Image, Core Animation, IOKit, Podcast Producer, AppleScript, Quick Look, Cocoa Bindings, and extensive Multithreading, enabling video effects not previously seen in real time on the platform.
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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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Things sets a new standard for Mac OS X developers for design, localization, and building complimentary Mac and iPhone apps that are fully synced.
Things is an easy to use personal task manager that allows users to easily keep track of to-dos, projects, and even work they are waiting for others to complete. Things for Mac OS X is fully scriptable using Applescript, has an innovative tag bar, adaptive smart lists, excellent technology adoption, wide system integration with Services, iCal, iChat, Mail, and Address Book, and seamless data syncing to Things on iPhone with Bonjour.
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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.
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Versions is a perfect example of a Mac application designed for a specific need, user base, and workflow.
Versions is a powerful tool for designers, developers, editors, or project managers working with Subversion on the Mac. It is entirely Cocoa-based and integrates extensively with Quick Look, WebKit to render the Timeline view, the FSEvent framework to seamlessly refresh working copy contents when something changes in the file system, and Keychain to allow users to authenticate to svn+ssh repositories with just a username and password.
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Best iPhone Student App
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.
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Best Mac OS X Student Product
Fontcase showcases the breadth and depth of design, functionality, and system integration possible from a student developer.
Fontcase provides an elegant UI backed by a powerful tagging system to help users manage and share the fonts installed on their system in a similar fashion to how they manage, organize, and share photos with iPhoto. Written entirely in Cocoa, Fontcase takes advantage of ImageKit's IKImageBrowserView for scrubbing, resizing, and display of the main icon view, Bonjour for discovering shared libraries on the network, CoreData for storing the library on disk, and Apple Type Services functions to query metadata and activate and deactivate fonts.
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Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App
AccuTerra v1.0.0 Beta
AccuTerraAccuTerra 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, OpenGL ES 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.
This app is not yet available on the App Store
