Apple Design Awards 2012

Where's My Water is a fun, simple - yet challenging - physics-based puzzle game featuring Swampy the Alligator and his quest to take a shower. With nearly 100,000 ratings, this app has achieved an average of 5 stars! Created by a small team of programmers, designers, and producers exclusively for iOS, Where's My Water is an excellent benchmark for casual games on iOS because of its strong game design paired with excellent iOS integration. This app was selected as an Apple Design Award winner because it's attractive and clever, has lots of personality with its likable character, has a consistent narrative, vibrant graphics, intuitive controls, simple game mechanics, and a great soundtrack. Where's My Water is great on both iPhone and iPad and is optimized for iOS's OpenGL ES, UIKit, and Multi-Touch to be fast and responsive. Additional integration with iCloud, In-App Purchase, GameCenter, Facebook and Twitter enable lots of additional game play and sharing.

Suit up with a selection of the coolest jetpacks ever made and take to the skies as Barry Steakfries, the lovable hero on a one-way trip to adventure! With over 150,000 five star ratings, Jetpack Joyride is a super-addictive, fast loading, endless side-scrolling arcade game that sets some really high standards for quality and performance on iOS. Available only on iOS, Jetpack Joyride was selected as an Apple Design Award winner because it uses iOS graphics and audio frameworks extensively to enable really fun graphics, it's optimized for Retina Display on iPad and iPhone, has a great soundtrack, delivers outstanding responsiveness and performance, and integrates with Game Center, In-App Purchase, Facebook and Twitter. Designed with simple, one-touch controls that are perfect for quick pick-up and play, Jetpack Joyride delivers a great game play experience that sets a new standard for all iOS games.

National Parks by National Geographic has everything you need to explore some of the most-visited U.S. national parks. Available only for iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad, National Parks was selected as an Apple Design Award winner for its strong design and attention to detail. It has high production quality, subtle and compelling animations and transitions, stunning photo galleries, tips about where and how photos were taken, and rare vintage images from the National Geographic Archive. It's fast, uses In-App Purchase for Park Guides, allows sharing through Facebook, email, and Twitter, is location aware, and has excellent maps integration, including smart caching for offline map viewing, Global and interactive map views with filtering by activity and seasonality, and thousands of points of interest all tagged with GPS coordinates for easy planning and locating.

Paper by FiftyThree allows you to easily capture ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations, or notes and make them look high quality. Designed from the ground up for touch, Paper by FiftyThree was picked as an Apple Design Award winner because of its excellent concept and execution on iPad and for the magical feeling people get when they draw with it for the first time. Its innovative tools and rendering style make anyone's drawings or sketches look great. It takes full advantage of Retina Display to create the illusion of applying strokes on real paper, offers an innovative In-App Purchase "try before you buy" experience to preview pens, uses OpenGL ES extensively for realistic lighting and shadows on content, uses Grand Central Dispatch and Blocks for progressive loading of art and networking, uses CoreText to allow full control over fonts and typesetting, and supports Twitter and export to many formats, such as PDF, making it easy to share content with other people and apps. Paper by FiftyThree has seen huge adoption with millions of pages created and shared on madewithpaper.fiftythree.com.

DM1 is an advanced, next generation drum machine that turns your iPad into a fun and creative beat-making machine, designed for serious sound creation, and loaded with various drum kits and effects. Optimized for Retina Display and available exclusively for iPad, DM1 is an Apple Design Award winner for its tight integration with iOS audio frameworks, high performance, rich feature set paired with fine-tuned interface design, and gorgeous hyper-realistic visual design. DM1 is built for Multi-Touch and supports Audio Background mode, Midi IN, Plug'n'Play with Camera Connection Kit, WIST synchronisation technology by Korg for syncing 2 iPads/iPhones together, and high-quality export to iTunes and more.

Created by a group of students as a 3D project for Mediadesign Highschool of Applied Sciences in Munich, DaWindci has developed into a beautiful and addictive touch-based puzzle game, exclusive to iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. DaWindci is selected as an Apple Design Award winner for its clever design, simple gameplay, integration with iOS, and great 3D visuals. DaWindci uses Multi-Touch gestures to paint wind, hurricanes, and lightning which help navigate a hot air balloon through each level. Optimized for iOS 5, DaWindci supports the new iPad's Retina Display, uses OpenGL ES extensively, uses GameCenter achievements and customized appearance APIs, and incorporates its own original music.