Each year during WWDC Apple gives away gray, cubic statues for “excellence in iOS and Mac OS X app design and development.” Its Apple Design Award (ADA) winners for 2011 have been announced in the categories of iPhone, iPad, Mac and student. In addition to the trophy (pictured) each ADA winner also receives a MacBook Air, iPad 2, and iPod touch, you know, to develop on.
Apple used three criteria for selecting this year’s winner:
- Design. Well-designed apps are delightful, elegant, intuitive, engaging, exciting, compelling, and reliable.
- Innovation. Innovative apps are revolutionary, inspirational, unique, and do things in completely new and exciting ways.
- Technical excellence. Technically advanced apps have excellent performance and make extensive use of the latest Apple technologies to deliver innovative, platform differentiating, and advanced features.
And the winners are…
iPhone
Infinity Blade ($5.99, iTunes, pictured above) - Beautiful, first-person sword-fighting epic.- Golfscape GPS Rangefinder ($9.99, iTunes) - Augmented reality golf rangefinder.
- Cut the Rope ($0.99, iTunes) - Addictive, physics-based puzzle game.
iPad
djay for iPad ($0.99, iTunes, pictured above) - Industry-changing DJ software, normally $20.- Osmos for iPad ($4.99, iTunes) - Gorgeous, ambient physics-based survival game.
- Our Choice ($4.99, iTunes) - Gesture driven, interactive book by Al Gore.
Mac
Capo ($49.99, Mac App Store, pictured above) - Uses sophisticated chord detection to reverse-engineer your iTunes library.- Pixelmator ($29.99 Mac App Store) - Photoshop killer, for the rest of us.
- Anomaly Warzone Earth ($6.99 Mac App Store) - Tower offense game for Mac loaded with OpenGL effects.
Student
Grades 2 (Free, iTunes, pictured above) - Slick GPA calculator app for iOS designed for students.- Pennant ($4.99, iTunes) - Excellent baseball history app with data visualization of 115,000 games.
- Pulse News (Free, iTunes) - Beautiful, thumbnail news and social network browser.
What are you waiting for? Take some time this weekend to try some of these best-of-best iOS and Mac OS apps. There’s also this gallery of screenshots from the ADA 2011-winning apps, if you’d like to see more.
Did any of your favorites not make the list?
