What the Winners of Apple"s Design Awards Thought About WWDC - Webmaster News

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SAN FRANCISCO — They stood on stage beaming like parents, many holding hefty metallic squares with glowing Apple logos. They were the developers of the 12 apps that had just won coveted Apple Design Awards at the company’s 25th annual World Wide Developers Conference on Monday.

The choices were compelling, but what I really wanted to know was what the award-winning developers thought of Apple’s keynote and fire hose of announcements. So as the decorated developers milled about the stage, we asked a few of the award winners about their products and WWDC perceptions — where Apple delivered and where it disappointed.

The app icons for the 12 Apple Design Award winners.

Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanoff

One of the winners, Storehouse, is a visually compelling iPad app that lets anyone turn their photos into image-driven, interactive stories (the company has secured $7 million in funding). Founders Tim Donnelly (formerly of The Daily) and Mark Kawano (formerly of Apple) said they spent roughly a year making a “publishing app for the post-PC world.” The two developers started work in January 2013, and since then, the team has grown to 13 people.

Donnelly and Kawano said they were quite pleased with Apple’s updates and saw immediate opportunities in some of the upcoming iOS 8 updates. “Being able to have access to your photos all the time will empower our users to tell stories,” Kawano said, referring to the iCloud update that will give ubiquitous access to all cloud-based photos from all devices.

However, the cofounders didn’t view iOS 8′s camera functionality updates as new features, but rather access to existing ones.

Senri founder and software engineer Shahrouz Zolfaghari.

Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanoff

Senri’s platform adventure game Leo’s Fortune won an Apple Design Award as much for its attractive design as it did for its on-screen guidance. Senri founder and developer Shahrouz Zolfaghari said Apple’s powerful new API, Metal, is the most exciting thing to come out of the WWDC keynote.

“It will enable us to make games more like console games,” Zolfaghari said. “It will really improve the latency of actions. It opens up the opportunity to make games that are more interactive.” He even believes Metal could make future games more energy efficient.

Zolfaghari expects that while he may use Metal to update Leo’s Fortune, it’s more likely he’ll build new games with the API. “I think [Metal] will open up the possibility to make new genres of games for iOS,” he said.

But one thing was missing from Tim Cook’s keynote, according to Zolfaghari: hardware. “I’d like to see stuff that works on the TV,” he said, noting that iOS could work well as a gaming platform for large screen TVs.

USTWO senior games developer Manesh Mistry (L) and USTWO executive games producer Dan Gray show off their Apple Design Award.

Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanoff

Monument Valley is the game M. C. Escher would have built if he were an app developer. In fact, the game’s developers, Manesh Mistry and Dan Gray, admitted that Escher’s mind-bending optical illusion art was an inspiration.

This is often the first thing people notice when they see screenshots of the game, Gray said. “I think it’s really nice to hit that inspiration with younger people who might not know who Escher is,” he added. Mistry said that the Escher-like design is a natural extension of working in an “isometric perspective,” or the representation of 3D in a 2D drawing.

Mistry said the two biggest WWDC announcements in their eyes were Swift, Apple’s new programming language, and Metal.

“[Swift is] really incredible, I need to dig into that,” Mistry said. “To think that you could have scripting power that’s faster than native is just — it’s blowing my mind.”

The developers echoed the hope for hardware, but Mistry said the fact that Apple announced so much software made up for it. “I felt fairly overwhelmed and satisfied after the keynote,” he said.

Gray laughed. “We always want more hardware announcements,” he said. “Every single week we want more.”

Surely others wanted more, too. But among this small group of app developers who figured out how to please Apple, it seems as though Apple pleased them, too.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/03/apple-design-awards-wwdc/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss