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The 2013 Apple Design Award Winners

The Apple Design Awards recognize state of the art iOS and OS X apps that are well-designed, innovative, and take advantage of the latest technologies to provide an immersive, fun, and compelling experience. These apps set new standards in terms of interface design, system integration, rich functionality, and high performance; every year, Apple celebrates developers and their outstanding work by awarding them an Apple Design Award trophy and other special prizes.

After evaluating the “broadest set of apps possible”, Apple has picked this year’s winners with a dedicated event at Moscone West on WWDC 2013 opening day. We have compiled the full list of 2013 Apple Design Award Winners below.

For 2012 ADA winners, check out our previous coverage here.

Student

Mac & iOS

As noted by @SteveStreza, this year Apple also awarded students who wrote custom apps for their WWDC scholarships.

For more coverage, check out our WWDC 2013 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.

Apple Posts WWDC 2013 Keynote, iOS 7, “Designed by Apple” Videos

For those who didn’t follow a liveblog or the news as it unfolded on Twitter, Apple has now posted the keynote video of its WWDC 2013 keynote held earlier today in San Francisco.  The video can be streamed here, and a higher quality version should be made available in a few hours through iTunes (on the Apple Keynotes podcast). To avoid streaming errors, Safari is recommended for the best viewing experience.

Alongside the keynote, Apple has also posted promotional videos for iOS 7 (announced today) and “Designed by Apple”, a new campaign that the company will start running today as a TV ad. The iOS 7 video, featuring an introduction by Apple’s Jony Ive, is available here.

“Designed by Apple” has received its own webpage, where Apple has posted two videos. The first one was first shown today in San Francisco, before the keynote started; the second one is a TV ad that was aired at the end of the presentation. The first video features a series of animations with the following text:

If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything?

We start to confuse convenience with joy, abundance with choice. Designing something requires focus.

The first thing we ask is: what do we want people to feel? Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection. Then we begin to craft around our intention. It takes time…

There are a thousand no’s for every yes. We simplify. We perfect. We start over.

Until everything we touch enhances each life it touches.

Only then do we sign our work.

The new videos can be watched here.

For more coverage, check out our WWDC 2013 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.

The Numbers From Apple’s WWDC 2013 Keynote

As usual with keynotes in recent years, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook walked on stage today and offered an overview of the company’s state of the business and other noteworthy statistics. These numbers, which Apple typically shares during the year in separate press releases or product announcements, are always interesting as they provide a complete picture of Apple’s sales, installed base, and more.

  • 24th WWDC, longest developer conference with attendees from 60 countries
  • 6 million registered developers, 1.5 million since WWDC 2012
  • WWDC 2013 was sold out in 71 seconds
  • Over 1 million people per day visited Apple retail stores last year
  • 407 stores around the world in 14 countries
  • There are 900,000 apps on the App Store
  • There are 375,000 iPad apps
  • 575 million accounts on the Store
  • $10 billion paid to developers, $5 billion paid in the last year alone
  • 72 million installed Macs
  • 28 million Mountain Lion copies since announcement, best release yet
  • 35% of users adopted Mountain Lion it in first six months
  • 1.8 million iBooks available on the Store
  • 300 million iCloud accounts
  • 35 billion redownloads of iTunes content
  • Game Center has over 240 million users
  • 800 billion iMessages have been sent to date
  • 7.4 trillion push notifications sent to date
  • Over 600 million iOS devices sold

For more coverage, check out our WWDC 2013 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.

Sponsor: Smile

Our thanks goes out to Smile this week for sponsoring MacStories with PDFpen 6.

PDFpen offers an affordable alternative for marking up, editing, and adding images to PDF documents. Available across Mac and iOS, PDFpen goes anywhere you do, giving you the capability to correct typos, add your signatures, and re-order pages on the fly. Because PDFpen uses OCR (optical character recognition) on PDFs and scanned documents, text is digitized so you can edit text and search the entire document for a particular keyword or phrase.

PDFpen 6 for the Mac supports Retina displays, and comes equipped with a powerful toolbar for getting things done faster than before. And for use in the office, you can export documents to a Microsoft Word document. Best of all, PDFpen 6 will auto save as you annotate or edit your PDFs, meaning you’ll never lose your progress if you have leave for a quick meeting.

PDFpen 6 is only $59.95 on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store. You can learn more and download a free trial here.

Apple To Live Stream Today’s WWDC Keynote

As noted by MacRumors, Apple will once again provide a live video stream of today’s WWDC 2013 keynote in San Francisco. With an update pushed overnight to Apple TV owners, Apple has added a live feed for WWDC 2013 to its existing Apple Events channel.

The last time Apple used the special Apple TV channel was on October 23, 2012, when they unveiled, among other announcements, the iPad mini. Before October 2012, Apple had offered a live stream for its “Back to the Mac” event in 2010, when the company introduced OS X Lion and a new line of MacBook Airs.

Apple hasn’t yet confirmed whether the event will also be streamed on its website to desktop and mobile browsers, but it’s likely that a link will be put up shortly on Apple’s Events webpage.

Update: As expected, Apple just confirmed that the keynote will also be streamed on its website.

Apple’s WWDC 2013 keynote kicks off at 10 AM PDT; you can check your own timezone here.

07:00 — Honolulu, Hawaii
10:00 — San Francisco, California
13:00 — New York, New York
14:00 — São Paulo, Brazil
18:00 — London, England
19:00 — Rome, Italy
20:00 — Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
21:00 — Moscow, Russia
22:30 — New Delhi, India
01:00 — Shanghai, China (June 11)
02:00 — Tokyo, Japan (June 11)
03:00 — Sydney, Australia (June 11)

We’ll be offering a liveblog of today’s keynote here.

The New Yorker’s Exposé on Canabalt→

Simon Parkin of The New Yorker:

“The first endless runner I played was Canabalt,” said Luke Muscat, Jetpack Joyride’s designer. “You had this single button to jump. I loved the juxtaposition of high-intensity action with absolute simplicity.” Prior to Canabalt’s release, game makers had struggled to reconcile the smartphone’s absence of buttons with the interactive complexities of contemporary video games. Canabalt’s solution was elegant and simple: tap anywhere on the glass and your character leaps. Muscat recalled: “I remember playing Canabalt and just thinking, How has nobody ever thought of this before?”

There’s a lot of endless runners on the iPhone, and Canabalt is widely attributed as the game that started it all. It’s also the only runner that’s maintained my interest, being one of a few games that doesn’t ask me to buy something in a store or prompt me with a tutorial. It’s an attractive game with only a few core mechanics and touchscreen controls that aren’t middling (you feel the weight of your character as he leaps from ledge to ledge). There’s a real sense of desperation in the game as you stumble out of the first window and onto the rooftops below, scrambling onto your feet as the game reveals the backdrop of a burning city under siege. It begs you to ask a lot of questions, though it never answers them, even as more is revealed the farther you run. It’s a classic.

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How Apple’s Magsafe Connector Works→

Ken Shirriff tore down Apple’s Magsafe 2 connector, explaining the symmetrical pin layout, how the connector sticks to your MacBook, and how the Magsafe LEDs function to notify you of its charging status. The Magsafe is one of the MacBook’s best features, and it’s deceivingly complex: the charger goes through a startup process as it’s connected to verify that it has a solid connection with the MacBook. If you’re into electronics, there’s a lot of geeky information here pertaining to the circuit board, switch, and how to obtain the charger’s ID code.

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