Apple Design Awards 2015

Crossy Road is an incredibly addictive, endless arcade hopper with countless surprises. Full of whimsy and fun lo-fi artwork, Crossy Road fuses art, commerce, design, and marketing into a game with heart and personality that's deserving of an Apple Design Award. Crossy Road is a new take on a classic game style with viral and exciting gameplay, beautiful, 8-bit isometric graphics, expressive characters, hilarious collision animations, and excellent sound design. It employs In-App Purchase to add variety, not just to help players progress.

Crossy Road is localized in English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chines, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. This game debuted on iOS and is available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch.

Vainglory is an intense, real-time mobile multiplayer online battle arena, perfected for touch on iPad and iPhone. Vainglory is selected as an Apple Design Award winner because it delivers beautiful, high-fidelity graphics and animations, offers an incredibly polished and immersive experience, and enables a fast-paced, endless multiplayer experience on iOS that's all about the highs, lows, excitement, anticipation, friendships, and competition.

Vainglory is a state-of-the-art game that sets a new standard for performance by utilizing Metal and the A8 chip to enable 60 frame per second rendering, sub 30ms control response, and 1.3 million polygon drawing capacity. It offers an incredibly rich environment and lighting effects, and more than 100 fully animated characters.

Does Not Commute is an addictive, strategic driving game for iOS with surprising depth, and great balance of story, characters, and action. Does Not Commute is a time traveller's paradox where players race themselves and try to complete challenges by avoiding themselves, and mistakes send a ripple effect through the game. It's carelessly easy at first, but progresses nicely toward increased complexity. What starts out as a relaxing commute in a small town quickly devolves into chaos.

Does Not Commute wins an Apple Design Award for its highly stylize and beautiful late 1960s aesthetic, which is carried throughout every detail of the game. Each driver has a unique character, back story, and motivation. Does Not Commute uses a custom-built graphics engine optimized for iOS. It supports iCloud for game state synchronization, Game Center for challenges and achievements, and In-App Purchase for premium game play. The on-boarding experience makes it easy to pick up the game. Does Not Commute debuted on iOS, is available for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and is localized in English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

Exclusive to iOS, Shadowmatic is an ornately crafted and imaginative puzzle game in which abstract objects are rotated to find recognizable silhouettes in projected shadows. Selected as an Apple Design Award winner for its attention to detail, high-fidelity rendering, excellent execution, and perfect representation of Multi-touch game play, Shadowmatic challenges your spatial thinking with more than 80 puzzles in gorgeous atmospheric environments rendered with highly realistic textures and shadows.

Set to a beautiful soundtrack, each Shadowmatic scene is tuned and optimized for each iOS device, from iPhone 3GS to the newest iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, iPad Mini Retina, and iPad Air 2. Shadowmatic uses Metal on iOS to produce stunning visuals with shadows, bloom, and reflective surfaces, and supports device motion to enable a clever motion-based 3D parallax experience that makes it seem as if you're viewing each scene through a window. It's also localized in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.

Fantastical 2 is a meticulously designed, full-featured calendaring app designed exclusively for OS X Yosemite. It wins an Apple Design Award for its clean design, rich functionality, speed, responsiveness, support for popular localizations, and deep integration with OS X. Fantastical 2 sports a robust, innovative, localized, natural language parser allowing the quick creation of events and complex recurring events with conversational requests. Location-aware calendar sets help manage schedules for people on the go and the mini window is a thoughtful companion to a potentially busy desktop. Fantastical 2 supports Handoff to easily move from Mac to iPhone and iPad, and back. Tuned for OS X, Fantastical 2 quickly scrolls thru appointments, as well as weeks, months, and years. It also offers Action and Share extensions, and a valuable Today widget.

Adaptable calendar views help users see exactly what they want, and deep time-zone support provides accurate and flexible scheduling options. Fantastical 2 supports MapKit, Core Location, Geo-fencing, Applescript, and iCloud reminders, and works with all major calendaring services that offer native CalDAV, iCloud, Google, Yahoo, and other calendaring services support. It's localized in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese and is only available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Workflow is a powerful automation tool, available exclusively for iOS and watchOS, that connects apps and actions together to automate things you do every day. Selected as an Apple Design Award winner for its outstanding use of iOS accessibility features, Workflow delivers an excellent implementation for VoiceOver with clearly labeled items, thoughtful hints, and drag/drop announcements, all of which make the app usable and quickly accessible to those who are blind or low-vision. The creators of Workflow understand that true accessibility is not just a technical task, it also requires design and usability consideration. Apple devices come standard with award-winning accessibility features and iOS offers unmatched accessibility support.