Letterpress, Evernote, Coda 2 Make Apple's 2013 List of Best Designed Apps


At its annual Apple Design Awards on Monday evening, held at WWDC, Apple announced the winners of this year’s design awards. The majority of the winners were iOS apps, including a handful from the gaming category, including Letterpress, Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders, BadLand, and Ridiculous Fishing.

Among the winners, perhaps the most recognizable name is Letterpress. The game’s creator, Loren Brichter, designed and engineered the game by himself. Brichter is a top developer and designer for iOS and OS X, he’s also known for Tweetie, which was the most popular Twitter app on the iPhone (for quite some time) and was eventually acquired by Twitter itself and turned into Twitter for iOS/Mac. Apple praised Letterpress’s “masterful asynchronous gameplay” and “its beautifully understated game interface, simple gestures, subtle animations, and restrained sound design.”

Apple also selected Procreate for iPad, Evernote (for iPhone, iPad, and Mac), and Finish, which is a task manager for the iPhone. While talking about Procreate, Apple stated, it “is a powerhouse of iOS technologies like ARC, Grand Central Dispatch, and OpenGL ES which deliver state-of-the-art performance and responsiveness, 64-bit precision, and smooth 60 fps rendering of canvas sizes up to 4K x 4K.”

One of the winners I was excited to see announced was Coda 2, which is our favorite web development app on the Mac.  Coda 2 was also the only Mac exclusive app selected for a design award.

Yahoo’s new weather app was also a winner of a design award, I’m sure that put a little swagger back into their step.  Nice job, Yahoo!

If you want to see the complete list along with what each app has to offer, check out the design award winners here.