Apple held its latest Apple Design Awards today after its WWDC conference, recognizing iOS and Mac apps which it feels offer the best experience from a design, usability and technology standpoint. This year’s winners include Yahoo News Digest, Storehouse, Sky Guide, Monument Valley and others.
Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo’s News Digest app is based on Summly’s technology, a company Yahoo acquired last year. It delivers news roundups twice a day. After Yahoo launched the app globally this month, which was previously restricted to the US and UK, it is available in four editions: the US, UK, Canada and ‘rest of the world’.
Threes!
Threes! is a sliding number puzzle game that has been praised for its elegant design.
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➤ Threes!
Monument Valley
An indie hit game that combines a top-down isometric design, a beautiful color palette and a haunting soundtrack, Monument Valley lets players guide a silent princess called Ida through a series of tricky puzzles. We previously hailed it as a beautiful piece of interactive art.
Sky Guide
This is a stargazing app that lets you hold your iPhone or iPad up to the sky to automatically find stars, constellations, planets and satellites. It contains rich, immersive visuals and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.
Leo’s Fortune
This is an adventure game where you hunt down the thief that stole your gold. With handcrafted graphics, Leo’s Fortune has been dubbed a lovable iPhone game.
Blek
A puzzle game that involves drawing a line to collect the colored circles presented on the screen, Blek was recognized by the New York Times as one of the year’s best iPad games in December last year. It’s now available for the iPhone too.
➤ Blek
Device 6
A detective game that folds in mystery-solving with a paperback novel, Device 6 also made it to our roundup of the 10 best iOS games from 2013. We called it a “piece of interactive entertainment that you don’t want to miss.”
➤ Device 6
Storehouse
This beautiful visual storytelling app made headlines when it was launched by Apple’s former user experience evangelist and UI designer Mark Kawano – whose design and UX credentials include iPhoto, Aperture and Photoshop. The app is designed to be like a magazine, but even better, as videos and images can be woven in for a multimedia experience like no other.
Read – Storehouse review: Can this iPad app help everyone tell beautiful, visual stories?
Other than the above iOS apps, Apple also recognized the best Mac apps — journaling app Day One and photography app Cinemagraph Pro, which helps you create flixels.
Apple also awarded special prizes to students who developed custom apps as part of their scholarship award. This year, the winners were Pano Perfect and Addimal Adventure.
Check out our full coverage of Apple’s WWDC 2014 here.
Headline image via Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
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