Category: Apple Developer News

The Apple Design Awards celebrate innovation, ingenuity, design excellence, and outstanding technical achievement. A WWDC tradition, the ADAs highlight those who take thoughtful and creative approaches to their apps and games, giving people new ways to work, play, or imagine things that were never before possible.

“We’ve been awarding great design for more than two decades now, and each year’s winners set new standards for others to emulate,” said John Geleynse, Senior Director of Evangelism and longtime host of the Apple Design Awards.

This year’s winners are no different: Their apps are beautiful, intuitive, captivating and delightful. They spring from a deep understanding of and empathy for the people they’re intended to serve. They are unique, exhaustively refined, and crafted with care and attention to detail.

2020 Apple Design Awards

The Apple Design Awards recognize excellence in design and innovation for apps and games across all of Apple’s platforms. Meet the 2020 winners.

The winners of the 2020 Apple Design Awards

Join us as we surprise the 2020 winners of the Apple Design Awards. The Apple Design Awards recognize excellence in design and innovation for apps and games across all of Apple’s platforms.

“Winning apps require a lot of work,” said Geleynse, “And we want to honor the effort, dedication, creativity, and new ideas that lead to innovative solutions like these.”

This year, the honor continues beyond an Apple Design Award and FaceTime celebration: Starting this Friday and each week thereafter, the Developer app will feature exclusive interviews with each winner about their creative process and how they brought their bold and distinctive ideas to life.

Take a quick look at this year’s Apple Design Award winners, along with a few choice highlights from our upcoming interviews.

Majd Taby, Darkroom

“We’ve tried to abstract away all the complexity of photo editing — no import, no export, hiding away the complexity unless you ask for it… the app is much more powerful and complex than the design… that’s just part of the ongoing design challenge of trying to make something that’s usable and powerful at the same time.”

Eran Hilleli, Looom

“The design thought of Looom is the flow first — experience first… Trying to make drawn animation exist in some tool that was almost like a Gameboy… something you can kick back and relax, which is not something that, usually, animation is about.”

István Csanády, Shapr3D

“I think that great interaction design is… always a lot of blood, sweat, and tears… There are no shortcuts because this is something that you can’t really figure out. You just have to observe how your users actually want to interact your with design or with your software… we did hundreds of prototypes, interaction prototypes — you can step-by-step get to the right solution… it took us four and a half years to get to this level of polish.”

David William Hearn, StaffPad

“The core tenet of the app is really: How is this helping me write music? How is this making my day nicer and better and hopefully making me write better music? If it can help me do that, and at least if I finish a project and I don’t feel exhausted at the end of it, then I think that every idea has been worth it. But there’s always more to do. It’s never done.”

Simon Flesser, Sayonara Wild Hearts

“This is a game that is very much about the music, right?… It started very differently, with a much more sinister tone. But then as we were playing our prototype, randomly, this really energetic, pop song came on in the background… And it sort of just clicked. I literally said, ‘This is it.’”

Jenova Chen, Sky: Children of the Light

“With very small changes in the design, you can change how [the player] behaves, how they treat each other in your game. I think it’s your responsibility to think about: How are these players going to interact with your app, with your game, you know, on a daily basis? Is that healthy for them? Is that going to make them be thankful… rather than having resentment of the experience?”

Philipp Stollenmayer, Song of Bloom

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the game is trying to tell you. Some images are so abstract that you have to make up your own interpretation. To help the game communicate on every available channel, it was important to give it another sense… from the haptic vibrations, it helps you to understand if this is an active scene or a calm one — you get a really nice sense for the mood.”

Sam Rosenthal, Where Cards Fall

“A lot of the game feels very melancholic but at the same time — it’s a hopeful game. So the app icon is our main character in the winter — which is the present day — looking up… It is not somebody that is lost in the past but somebody that maybe has learned from what happened, has reflected and is looking towards what could be next.”

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Read more about the Apple Design Award winners on Apple Newsroom and the App Store.

Read more about the Apple Design Award winners on Apple Newsroom

Read more about the Apple Design Award winners on the App Store

Earlier this year, students from all around the world put their passion, ingenuity, and determination to work crafting Swift playground projects for the WWDC20 Swift Student Challenge. Students from 60 different countries and regions brought their talents to the table, using the challenge’s three-minute limit to stretch their imaginations and explore Apple’s frameworks and technologies. The resulting 350 Swift Student Challenge winners have created AR experiences, projects powered by machine learning, educational material, virtual musical instruments, 8-bit games, and so much more.

Swipe to unlock

In 2019, after having studied just one month at the Apple Developer Academy in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Henrique Conte submitted his first Swift playground project. While he didn’t win a WWDC Scholarship that year, the experience drove him to continue exploring and refining his code.

“This year I felt that, after reading and studying about so many different Apple frameworks, I should try to accomplish the WWDC19 main phrase: ‘Write code. Blow minds,’” he told us. And he did. His winning submission, a three-minute game designed for MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, excels in both its technical acuity and creativity.

Within the playground, players have to help Eleanor, a young developer, escape from a cave. The twist: The “cave” level is entirely located within the Touch Bar. “I chose to use unusual frameworks to show that it is possible to do amazing things with them,” Conte said. “I feel that [the Touch Bar] has so much potential yet to be discovered, and I wanted to demonstrate some of its capabilities.”

Though he had never previously developed for macOS, Conte immediately took to the challenge. Like learning any new development concept, he ran into a few initial obstacles — “when I received the message “No such module ‘UIKit’ [after trying to add it to my project] I noticed things would get interesting,” he joked — but he quickly picked up the fundamentals of Mac programming, using AppKit and SpriteKit to build a fully-interactive experience, including taps, slides, keyboard integrations, and multi-screen storytelling. He also paid close attention to the design, something that has become increasingly important to him.

“I am definitely not a designer,” says Conte, “But in the past few years I noticed how essential it is to follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and to provide a great experience. There is no point in creating a perfect code if people will have trouble using your application!”

You can find more of Conte’s work on the App Store: In the last year, he’s created four apps, including one to help children with autism communicate. He’s currently at work on his next project, which he’s building for both iOS and macOS, that addresses the problem of food waste. And — he’s happy to report — the macOS version will incorporate the Touch Bar.

The world turned upside-down

Louise Pieri, 21, fell in love with computer science at a young age in her native Lyons, France. She’s since gone on to study at École 42, the programming school founded by French businessman Xavier Niel. Pieri’s winning project, Meep, drew inspiration from an article she read in a scientific journal about the possibility of parallel universes, as well as her own personal journey as a transgender woman.

“Meep is a game with two levels: the first is a level where everything is reversed and upside-down and the second is where everything is normal,” says Pieri. “The story is about a little blue transgender monster who wants to reach the final level and turn pink… it’s a beautiful metaphor for what happens in the life of a trans person.”

Though Pieri had never previously used SpriteKit or AVKit, she knew she wanted to build a game for her Swift playground submission. She spent two days brainstorming ideas before landing on the concept for Meep and diving into the frameworks and interface. Initially, she’d hoped to show both of Meep’s universes on-screen at once before deciding on a multi-level experience, including an entire level upside-down.

In addition to designing and coding the game, Pieri also created her own 2D artwork for each level in Adobe Illustrator and a story for the game — all in under two weeks.

Pieri has been tuning into WWDC20 this year from France, and is especially keen to learn more about the future of Apple platforms. “I can’t wait to get to know iOS 14,” she says. That will come in handy for her next project — bringing a version of Meep to the App Store.

A robot of one’s own

Devin Green’s love of development stemmed from a lifelong fascination with thinking machines. “I have always been in awe of artificial intelligence,” he told us. Out of that idea, the 18-year-old’s winning project — an AI bot named Stanny — was born.

“With everything that is going on in the world right now, I thought people stuck in isolation might find it beneficial to their mental health to talk to a capable AI companion,” he said. Green, who will attend Stanford this fall for computer science and engineering, took about a week to build his playground — most of that time dedicated to refining machine learning models that created Stanny’s ‘intelligence.’

“The model was trained on a data file made up of all the things you could possibly say to Stanny,” Green said. After researching how others had trained chat bots, Green created his own model in TensorFlow, then brought it to his Xcode playground through Core ML Converters.

While no stranger to experimenting with machine learning models, Green used this project to get to know more of Apple’s ML offerings. “I wanted to make it as simple as possible to go from data to usable Artificial Intelligence,” he told us. He worked with NSLinguisticsTagger to build a working model, then created a generated Core ML model to predict the person’s intent from their query and architected his playground in SwiftUI.

Green sees Swift as the future of machine learning and AI applications. “Swift is not only a really simple and easy to use language, it’s also really expansive,” he told us. “It can be built on in such a way that [it] is capable of doing just about anything.”

Stanny isn’t quite as full-featured: His joke-loving AI is limited to only 63 different intents. But Green has big plans — and he can’t wait to incorporate some of the technology announced at WWDC20. “The Natural Language framework is astounding,” he told us. “If I had any doubts about using Swift for machine learning, they quickly disappeared while watching a natural language processing application understand text with about five lines of code… projects I’ve created, like Stanny, are about to get 100x better!”

Code as design

For first-time winner Renata Pôrto, the challenge gave her a chance to confront her own self-doubts. “As a designer, I have always felt insecurity regarding my ability to code more complex ideas,” she said. After two unsuccessful Swift playground submissions in previous years, the 21-year old student from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil had once again decided to submit. But after a few days of work, she scrapped the project.

“I was not satisfied with my own decision to continue with a ‘safe’ idea,” she told us. Instead, she began considering concepts she’d wanted to learn about but hadn’t yet explored — including generative art. “One of the things I always thought was fantastic about programming is the possibility of transforming lines of code into visual and interactive experiences,” she said. Just six days later, she emerged with Polar Patterns, a Swift playground that helps people learn more about mathematical roses and generate their own visual art.

“With SpriteKit, I was able to convert the polar equation of mathematical roses into SKShapes, transforming the results from the formula into visual elements,” she said. Pôrto designed just two images herself, relying on her algorithmic code and a few UIKit elements to create the entire visual experience.

Designing an entirely programmatic art interface was a departure for Pôrto. “I am very used to prototyping before programming,” she told us. This project, however, involved creating an experience that would dynamically shift and change depending on what actions someone took within the playground, making it important for Pôrto to visualize and experiment constantly to perfect her interface.

The result brings the beauty and complexity of polar roses to a Swift playground — and landed Pôrto a winning submission. “It’s a great joy learning about development, even though I am a design student,” she told us. “Studying design helped me to practice my empathy for [people] and to know what resources to use and how to work with them to achieve better results.”

That empathy continues through her work with a local developer group, creating educational tools for new developers in her community. “I always try to pass on my design knowledge to developers, and my developer knowledge to designers,” she said. “And hopefully one day they will make products that make a difference in other people’s lives.”

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Learn more about the Swift Student Challenge winners.

Swift Student Challenge winners determined to shape the future

App Store: Meet the Swift Student Challenge winners

Now games with Game Center capabilities display a beautifully redesigned in-game dashboard on iOS, tvOS, and macOS. Users can see their achievements, leaderboards, and Game Center profiles directly in your game when you implement the new Access Point. Game Center also now supports recurring leaderboards that keep rankings current, as well as leaderboards for daily, weekly, and monthly competitions. You can set up recurring leaderboards, add achievements, and opt in to the challenges feature in App Store Connect.

Learn more >

June 24, 2020

New tools in Core ML enable secure, cloud-based model deployment and model encryption, Create ML offers new templates and training capabilities, and new APIs for Vision and Natural Language give your apps more power. You can also work with third-party training libraries more easily with updated model converters and accelerated training support on Mac.

Learn more >

June 24, 2020

ARKit 4 introduces brand-new features that make the AR experiences in your apps even more lifelike. You can now access even more precise distance information gathered by the LiDAR Scanner on iPad Pro using Depth API, place AR experiences at a specific point in the world with Location Anchors, and more.

Learn more >

June 24, 2020

You can now view and respond to feedback filed by your team members if you’re part of an organization in the Apple Developer Program, the Apple Developer Enterprise Program, Apple School Manager, or Apple Business Manager. And you’ll still have a personal inbox for separate submissions, with the choice to move feedback to your team inbox at any time.

Learn more >

It wouldn’t be WWDC without a little music. Bring Khalid and The Killers into your living room and create your very own musical conference experience with the WWDC20 playlist collection, now available on Apple Music. The opening WWDC20 playlist features great artists like Glass Animals and Alicia Keys, and includes Aurora from this year’s opening video.

In addition, Apple Music is celebrating the powerful connection the development community has to music with a new “Music to Code to” series, which features several multi-hour playlists featuring different musical styles and genres.

Developers have long found connection and inspiration from music. Sam Rosenthal, creator of The Game Band’s Where Cards Fall on Apple Arcade, told us that his company name pays homage to the groups he listened to growing up. “A lot of the bands that I really loved… They didn’t stick with one sound,” he said. Rosenthal has carried that philosophy into his work: “Every time we make something, it should be different from the last. It should surprise people.”

Others, like writer and Shortcuts developer Federico Viticci, have built entire projects around a love of music. In 2019, the Italian native designed and built a shortcut, MusicBot, that helps people listen to more of their library and speed up common Music app interactions.

“When developing MusicBot, I needed to test it with data that was easy to find in my music library,” he told us. Viticci’s choice: His “all-time favorite band,” Oasis, whose myriad albums provided plenty of testing material.

Several of the Swift Student Challenge winners also shared their appreciation for a little musical motivation. “While I was creating [my] Playground, I used the WWDC19 playlist,” Gloria Cretella told us. A two-time scholarship winner, Cretella attended the conference for the first time in 2019, and used the playlist to remind herself of the experience. “I was a bit nostalgic,” she said. “Programming with the songs that were in the background at the conference brought me back.”

Everyone has their favorite tune or perfect mix. Brazillian Student Challenge winner Henrique Conte finds joy in French music while he codes, especially from his favorite Belgian singer Angèle. “Learning new languages is one of my passions because it allows us to connect with the world and understand cultures,” he told us. With this playlist, he said, he gets to improve his linguistic skills all while Angèle’s music focuses him on the task at hand.

Others, like StaffPad developer and composer David William Hearn, prefer to find time in the quieter moments between projects. “I’m actually reconnecting at the moment with some of the classics,” he told us, which include works by 20th century composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Though some of those compositions are short by classical standards, Hearn is quick to highlight the years of artistry and care behind them. “It’s someone’s life, you know?” he said. “I find that phenomenal.”

Discover the perfect soundtrack for your next programming project on Apple Music or wherever you like to listen, and know that you’re enjoying something uniquely human. “Music transcends our differences and has the power to unite us,” Viticci said. “To make us feel connected no matter what’s going on in the world.”

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You can tune in to the full WWDC20 playlist collection on Apple Music.

WWDC20 on Apple Music

Welcome back to day two of WWDC. (We hope you got some sleep after the excitement of those announcements!) Our first sessions are now available. Learn what’s happened so far and discover some of the great stuff in store for you.

Welcome to day two

We hope you’re rested and ready to learn about more of the latest Apple technologies and frameworks, because we’ve got a lot to share with you.

Tuesday

Catch up on the Keynote

Missed out on the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday? No FOMO necessary: We’ll take you through all the good stuff in under two minutes.

Monday@WWDC

It’s been a jam-packed first day at WWDC, full of exciting news from the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union. We’ll zoom through the highlights — and give you a sneak peek of what’s coming tomorrow.

Got a few hours? You can also watch the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union for more details on widgets, app clips, SwiftUI, and more — right in the Developer app.

Keynote

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off with exciting reveals, inspiration, and new opportunities to continue creating the most innovative apps in the world. Join the worldwide developer community for an in-depth look at the future of Apple platforms, directly from Apple Park.

Platforms State of the Union

Join the worldwide developer community for an in-depth look at the future of Apple platforms, directly from Apple Park.

Swan’s Quest

Tuesday kicks off “Swan’s Quest,” an interactive Swift Playgrounds adventure in four chapters for all ages. Use your programming prowess to aid our Hero in navigating through mystery, decoding scrolls, and writing music.

In our first chapter, our Hero must navigate a dark cave — and the only way to light the torches is to make them accessible. Learn about VoiceOver and write interesting audio descriptions. You just might help our Hero find their way out… and get a clue for the next challenge.

Swan’s Quest was created for Swift Playgrounds on iPad and Mac, integrating aspects of our Sonic Create, Sensor Create, and AR Create playgrounds to design an entirely new educational experience. Check it out, and don’t forget to stop by the Developer Forums and let us know what you think!

Swan’s Quest, Chapter 1: Voices in the dark

Swift Playgrounds presents “Swan’s Quest,” an interactive adventure in four chapters for all ages. In this chapter, our Hero must navigate a dark cave — and the only way to light the torches is to make them accessible. Learn about VoiceOver and write interesting audio descriptions. You…

Download Swift Playgrounds for iOS

Download Swift Playgrounds for macOS

Learn more about Swift Playgrounds

WWDC coding and design starter kit

Whether you’re learning to code early on or coming to it later in life, we want to help you start developing for Apple platforms. We’ve created a collection of sessions that provide a great introduction to our latest technologies and frameworks. We’ll be releasing new sessions in the collection every day — stay tuned!

WWDC20 coding and design starter kit

Explore developer documentation

There’s lots of new Developer Documentation and sample code to discover during WWDC20.

You can copy code directly from individual sessions using the Copy Code feature in the Developer app, download sample code projects on the Apple Developer website, and check out the new Technologies index, where you can quickly find information and API changes around existing frameworks.

Find the right documentation

WWDC20 Sample Code

Developer Documentation

Developer Documentation Technologies

Meet the developers

This week, the App Store is sharing stories of developers across the world as they adapt their businesses and help their communities. Here’s an excerpt from HomeCourt co-founder Philip Lam’s journey to support athletes and basketball players stuck at home:

A few weeks after the pandemic started, NEX Team cofounder Philip Lam noticed something unusual about HomeCourt, his company’s basketball-training app: Users were hacking it.

Unable to get to gyms and courts, athletes figured out how to adapt the app’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence—designed to track basketball shots, dribbles, and passes with an iPhone or iPad camera—for soccer, in-line skating, hockey, and other sports. “There’s no way for us to determine if you’re using a basketball,” says Lam. “People started noticing that it just worked.”

Read more on the App Store

Conversations at WWDC

Tune in for two special events later this week.

On Wednesday, Lisa hosts a discussion with former US Attorney General Eric Holder on the fight for equal justice, how technology can empower people to change the world for the better, and ways to help in this moment.

A conversation with Lisa Jackson and former Attorney General Eric Holder

Eric Holder was the 82nd Attorney General of the United States, having served from 2009 to 2015. The first Black American to hold the position, Holder’s six-year tenure also makes him one of the longest-serving occupants of the office. Currently a partner in Covington & Burling, he’s served in…

And on Thursday, the cast and creators of the Apple TV+ hit show Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet will answer questions from the Apple developer community. Join Rob McElhenney (executive producer/co-creator and Ian Grimm), Charlotte Nicdao (Poppy), Imani Hakim (Dana), Danny Pudi (Brad), and Megan Ganz (executive producer/co-creator) as they review one of their favorite scenes and answer submitted questions.

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Enjoy day two of WWDC! Sessions are available on the WWDC tab in the Apple Developer app as well as on Apple.com. And if you have questions about a session or want to chat with the community, don’t forget to check out the Developer Forums.

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June 22, 2020

Create even more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps. Apps built with Mac Catalyst now take on the new look of macOS Big Sur and help you better define the look and behavior of your apps. Provide full control of your app using just the keyboard, take advantage of the updated Photos picker, access more iOS frameworks, and more. There’s never been a better time to turn your iPad app into a powerful Mac app.

Learn more about Mac Catalyst >