Apple Design Awards

Good evening, developers, and welcome to the 2019 Apple Design Awards. Now, here's your host, Senior Director of Evangelism, John Geleynse. Hello. Well, hello, and welcome to another Apple Design Awards. Thanks for joining us this afternoon, especially after a long, but exciting day. And I just want to particularly thank all of you who have joined us from around the world online on the live stream for the ceremony right now. We've got a huge group.

You know, it's great for us to join as a community, and gather like this to take a few moments to celebrate and acknowledge excellence in innovation and design.

Because at Apple, we've been awarding excellent design for more than two decades now.

What started originally as the Apple Human Interface Design Excellence Awards, or HIDE Awards for short, was renamed a few years later to what is now known as the Apple Design Awards.

You know, the world around us is stunningly beautiful, and as humans, we're attracted to beautiful things, and to incredible designs.

We're drawn to these things, and we respond to them deeply. And at Apple, we believe the true -- the beauty -- that beautiful design is both appearance and function, and something that works well with each component deeply considered, and each aspect carefully crafted -- that that can be profoundly beautiful.

And so, simply judging something by how it looks isn't enough.

It's how it works. It has to work as beautifully as it looks, and great design reflects the broader definition of beauty. And it runs deeper than the interface. It's coherent, and it's cohesive. And it helps us to engage with each other in new, and innovative, and life-enhancing ways, and like compelling beauty, great design draws us in. And the Apple Design Awards have always been about this -- recognizing great design, and then celebrating the developers who positively impact everyone else, and real people with the things that they create, the things that you create.

Now, we select our winners each year by evaluating them in basically three key areas.

The first area is design.

We're looking for apps that are -- that have strong visual design, that are efficient and easy to use, that have great game play, that have attention to detail and polish, that are internally coherent. On the technology front, we're evaluating technology usage, and so we're looking for apps that are fast and responsive. We're looking for apps that take full advantage of all of the capabilities of our latest devices, and we're looking for apps that use the latest Apple technologies to do really great new things. And on the innovation front, we're looking for brilliance.

We're looking for new ideas.

We're looking for uniqueness, platform differentiation, and things that just weren't possible before. And the developers of our winning apps this evening have done an outstanding job, and outstanding work in these three areas, and more, and we want to honor that work.

We want to acknowledge the distinct joy and the challenges of the app creation process that we're all so familiar with.

We want to honor the endless hours, the late nights, and the dedication that goes into the pursuit of excellence.

We want to recognize the dead-ends, and the frustration, and the exhaustion sometimes that often goes unseen, and we're all familiar with that.

And we want to honor the unconventional thinking, the creativity, and the new ideas that lead to breakthroughs and innovative solutions. So let's get started.

Winners tonight are going to win some pretty great -- some pretty amazing prizes, and each prize package includes a 512 gigabyte iPhone XS with a set of AirPods, a 512 gigabyte 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil 2, a 64 gigabyte 4K Apple TV, an Apple Watch Series 4, a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, and a fully-loaded iMac Pro.

In addition -- in addition -- and this is what all of you want -- each winner will -- each winning develop -- each winning app will be highlighted on the App Store, similar to what we did last year on the Today tab for the Apple Design Award winners, and what we did throughout the year following the ceremony. So this year's winners will be highlighted in prominent ways on the App Stores.

And lastly, each winner will take home one of the coveted Apple Design Award trophies, except that we thought it was time for a refresh. And so, we have a completely new trophy this year, redesigned from the Apple Design Team. It retains the integrity and recognizable qualities of the original award, but reinterprets these with the qualities of our latest products. It's made out of 100% recycled aluminum, and featured a mirror-finished stainless steel Apple logo inlay. It's pretty sweet, if you ask me.

All right.

So we have nine -- we have nine winners today, and each winner will be announced and demoed by a colleague -- by colleagues of mine from the Apple -- from the -- from Apple's World Wide Developer Relations Team. Now, a little bit differently than other years -- if we announce your app, if we announce you as a winner, please stay in your seat because we're going to first talk about your app, and explain it to the community. And we're going to demo it, and when we've completed the demo, we're going to call you forward on stage, and ask that you'd come up on stage using these stairs here at this location. So, let's find out who the winners are.

To present our first winners, I'd like to invite my colleagues, Si Ching and Oscar on stage.

Thanks, John.

For our first award today, we have a gorgeous platform game designed for the mobile screen from the ground up. It's optimized for the portrait orientation with simple drag-and-release controls. Oscar and I had so much fun with this game, and we can't wait to show it to you.

The first award goes to Ordia by Loju.

Okay, let's get the demo up.

Okay, Oscar, let's take this game for a spin. Ordia tells the story of a first life form emerging from this gooey primordial soup, and then goes on a precarious trip to start its journey as a living being. It needs to jump through caves, gather nutrition, while also avoid being eaten or killed.

Ordia has its amazingly-rich and vibrant design style, a lovely blobbiness and bounciness throughout -- not just with the visuals, but also the sound design. What we love about this game is that it's intuitive enough so you simply start playing, and it introduces rules and challenges gradually as you go through the levels. It uses colors to communicate the roles of each element. Green and yellow things are friendly, while pink things must be avoided. It also leverages our Taptic Engine just the right amount, so you get this subtle and satisfying feedback while you play.

Ordia has three universes. They are immersive, consistent, yet also distinct from each other, with carefully balanced