Apple announces app-design award winners at WWDC

WWDC, Apple's developers' conference, kicked off earlier this week with some pretty big announcements. Despite the dearth of additional Steve Jobs appearances, the conference continues, and today the company unveiled the winners of its 2011 Apple Design Award (ADA).

The ADAs are intended to "recognize outstanding achievement and excellence in iPhone, iPad, and Mac app design." Winning apps must excel in design ("delightful, elegant, intuitive, engaging, exciting, compelling, and reliable"), innovation ("revolutionary, inspirational, unique"), and technical excellence ("innovative, platform differentiating, and advanced features"). The four Developer Showcase categories, with three winners each, are iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Student.

The Pulse News Reader is one of the Student winners; a well-reviewed app for reading news on the iPad and iPhone that was created by Stanford students, it was pulled from the Apple App Store last year after the New York Times complained about it—but clearly, it's back. The other student winners include a GPA calculator called Grades 2 and Pennant, an interactive history of baseball.

The iPhone app winners include two games, Cut the Rope and Infinity Blade, as well as an augmented reality rangefinder for golf courses. For the iPad, the winners are Osmos (a physics-based game), an interactive book platform called Our Choice, and Djay, an app that you use with your iTunes library. And the Mac winners are a musician's tool called Capo; Pixelmator, an image editor; and Anomoly Warzone Earth, an action/strategy game.

See all the details at Apple's WWDC website.

—Carol Mangis