Apple’s 2020 Apple Design Awards Snub the Mac Again
Some developers thought that the Apple Design Awards were canceled this year, but Apple was just waiting for WWDC to wrap up before announcing the winners. Taking the recent years’ trend toward ignoring Mac apps to its logical extreme (see our Apple Design Award series), there wasn’t a single winner for the Mac. The top winners for iOS and iPadOS were photo and video editor Darkroom, animation tool Looom, CAD app Shapr3D, and music notation app StaffPad. A number of games also won awards, including the Apple Arcade hit Sayonara Wild Hearts, which absolutely deserved a design award.
Hmmm. I liked the fresh thinking underpinning the animation tool Looom but the iOS app that most impressed me this year was Focos and the 3D lighting and depth mapping it offers. Darkroom is a very smart version of what has been on offer for years already.
Perhaps its out of kilter with current Apple thinking to propose a separate Mac section… and I’ve not seen anything new this year, nothing really new since Affinity’s Publisher or Hype or Soulver in previous years. On the other hand I’ve increasingly come to rely on mature software Capture One, DEVONthink, Path Finder…