iPhone reigns at Apple design awards
So much for widgets
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WWDC The iPhone's ascent as a full-fledged development environment was in evidence Tuesday night when the 2009 Apple Design Awards were announced at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Since they were instituted in 1997 as the Human Interface Design Excellence Awards - and nicknamed the Heidi's - the Apple Design Awards have been an annual exercise and a good way to gauge the focus of the Apple Developer community. In 2007, for example, iPhone apps were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye - and a subway-scheduling dashboard widget named The BART Widget was among the winners.
Does anyone code widgets anymore? Thought not.
Last year, awards were handed out to two iPhone web apps created using Apple's original - and highly restrictive - iPhone web-centric development scheme. At the same event, however, iPhone Developer Showcase awards were also bestowed on a handful of full-fledged but unreleased iPhone apps - unreleased because the 2008 awards event was held in June and the iTunes App Store didn't launch until July.
This year the success of the iPhone Developer Program was celebrated - there were, for example, more iPhone awards than Mac OS X awards: six to five. The reason for the award inflation is simple: last year a mere 1,700 iPhone web apps existed. This year there are more than 50,000 apps in the iTunes apps store. For the iPhone, it's been a hell of a year - and the latest Apple Design Awards event put an exclamation mark after that inarguable statement.
In past years, awards were handed out in specific categories - best game, best developer tool, best scientific computing solution, and the like. This year, that scheme was dropped, and the winners were simply grouped into "showcases," with the exception of the student winners and one as-yet-unreleased iPhone app.
iPhone awards
iPhone Developer Showcase:
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MLB at Bat 2009 1.0.1 - MLB.com
An impressive array of deep-tech capabilities was used to create this baseball-lover's delight from a deep-pockets developer. -
Postage 1.0 - Rogue Sheep
An attractive, easy-to-use interface distinguishes this straightforward design-an-online-postcard-and-mail-it app. -
Topple 2 1.1 - ngmoco:)
The iPhone's accelerometer is used to good effect in this Blockhead deriviative for casual gamers. -
Tweetie 1.3.1 - atebits
If you really must tweet, here's an elegantly interfaced way to keep up with your twittering friends and colleagues
Best iPhone Student App:
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Wooden Labyrinth 3D 1.2.1 (iTunes link) - Elias Pietil
There are a ton of roll-the-ball games available on the iPhone, but this student-written example has one of the most-refined interfaces.
Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App:
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AccuTerra 1.0.0 beta - AccuTerra
This hiking and biking route-finder and experience-sharer exploits iPhone 3.0 technologies such as in-app payments and push notification.
Mac OS X awards
Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase:
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Billings 3.0.5 - Marketcircle
Lots of apps help small businesses manage their time and billings, but few offer such a broad array of options and attractive invoice templates. -
BoinxTV 1.3 - Boinx Software
The developers of this "TV sudio on your Mac" used an impressive array of Leopard componets to wring tons of performance and functionality out of that OS. -
Things 1.1 - Cultured Code
Simple and easy-to-use are the ways to go for personal task managers, and this app's developers built their feature-full, AppleScriptable offering with that in mind. -
Versions 1.0.3 - Sofa
The Subversion open-source version control system is insanely useful but a total bee-atch to use. Versions puts a clean Mac GUI between developers and Subversion.
Best Mac OS X Student Product:
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Fontcase v1.1.3 - Pieter Omvlee
This insanely comprehensive and easy-to-use font manager was created by a single Dutch student. Hire him the first chance you get.
That's this year's crop of Apple Design Award winners. Expect next year's Apple judges to put the spotlight on developers who exploit the capabilities of the iPhone 3G S and iPhone Software 3.0, plus new technologies in Mac OS X Snow Leopard such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.
Or, it's just possible that a new category of awards will open up, focused on software written for the long-rumored Apple tablet/netbook/media-pad/ebook/whatever. ®
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COMMENTS
MS could learn a thing or two
I think Microsoft should have done exactly the same thing with Windows XP SP2.
When they released SP2 for XP, it was pretty much a rewrite of the kernel to implement the NX (no-execute) bit, thereby rendering buffer-overrun errors harmless. Among other things - but that was the headline change.
So they had gone to all the trouble of rewriting the core of the OS, and then released it as a free service pack.
The perception by all users was therefore that XP SP2 was a mere service pack, and not a 'new OS'. So when they released Vista at the end of 2007, everyone was screaming about how it was the first update to Windows for over six years.
If MS had instead charged a nominal fee for "Windows XP v2" and lauded it as a better Windows than Windows XP, then they would have probably been able to delay Vista until it was ready. Because lets face it - it wasn't.
And everyone knows (unfortunately) ... perception is everything.
@AC 11:30 - less than 10%....
....yeah ok no history lessons here but we all know why Microsoft has the majority and it's nothing to do with how good it's software is.
Getting nowhere fast - I think you'll find sales figures disagree. More and more educational establishments are integrating more and more Apple hardware (and Linux OS's) into their plans. That's most certainly a good sign of the changes now taking place. The general public are losing confidence in Microsoft. From conversations I have on a regular basis they are sick to death of the daily hassles they have to put up with and the uncertainties surrounding the new releases and they just want out. Apple are providing decent, reliable alternative whether the Microsoft fanbois want to accept it or not.
Finally, lets face it the phrase "iPhone killer" wasn't coined to describe a product that is classed by those in the industry as a fail.
Yawn
It's still less than 10% and getting nowhere - very fast.
"excited by the interesting things the Apple teams do" - sorry, I pissed myself at that.
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