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Best App Ever 2012 winners announced, Walking Dead takes top prize
Our friend Jeff Scott over at 148Apps has been running the annual Best App Ever awards for five years now, featuring some of the greatest apps on the App Store voted on by popular demand to determine the "Best App Ever." Last year's winners have just been announced, and Telltale's The Walking Dead game has taken the top spot in voting. There's no question at all that it's a great game and a terrific app, though personally I played it on the Xbox 360, and I preferred that platform. But it's a solid choice, and if you don't like that one, there are lots and lots of other categories to go through. Launch Center Pro, for example (which allows you to launch not just apps, but specific functions within them), won for Most Innovative App, while sync/sharing app Dropbox picked up Most Useful App. One of my favorite games, Punch Quest, won both Best Time Killer and Best Free To Play Game, while the great Junk Jack sandbox adventure game won for Most Addicting Game. There are tons of great apps in this list -- some are extremely popular, but there are a few choice gems in there that you may not have tried yet. Congrats to Jeff on a fifth successful year of the Best App Ever awards, and the site says they'll be back at the end of this year to reward the best of 2013.
Spacetime Studios' Cinco Barnes talks Dark Legends design
If you have wondered about what was going on in Spacetime Studios' Cinco Barnes' head while designing Dark Legends, wonder no more. I was asked to sit in on a Google + hangout, essentially a public video conference call, with Cinco, Carter Dotson from 148apps and Heidi Duran from GirlGamer. The event was moderated by Ashley Esqueda from G4TV. Cinco fielded some questions from us and fans of the game. Want to see some cool concept art? Need to know if the energy mechanic in Dark Legends was created just to make fast cash? Have you heard about Spacetime's newly announced title Arcane Legends, but have no idea what might be involved with the game? Have you wondered about the images in the opening video, the appearance of top hats, and the possibility of obtaining all of those great costumes through in-game means? You can find out the answers to these and other important questions in the video, embedded just after the cut.
Rumor: Rovio's new game is Casey's Contraptions
148Apps has done a little bit of digging, and has possibly discovered what Angry Birds creators Rovio are up to next. Rovio recently released a thank you/teaser video for a full billion Angry Birds downloads, and in the very end of that video, a character appears: It's a younger kid, with some pulleys and balloons in the background. Haven't we seen that kid before? Indeed, it appears to be Casey, of Casey's Contraptions, an iOS game that came out around this time last year. That game is still available, in HD form anyway, on the App Store. Casey's creator Noel Llopis said this to 148Apps: "Before rumors start flying, Rovio is a perfect gentleman. Not a Zynga at all. Don't worry, all is well." That seems to point to the fact that Rovio has possibly acquired Llopis' skills and the game, and is presumably publishing it or a sequel in the near future. I'm not sure this is the game Rovio was talking about when they said they were making a non-Angry Birds title -- Rovio has acquired other developers before, so this seems more like an acquisition or a publishing deal than an official Rovio game. But we'll see -- Casey's Contraptions was a terrific game that suffered a little bit from lack of exposure, and Rovio has no shortage of an audience to bring to it. If indeed the two are teaming up on another Contraptions release, odds are that's good news for everybody.
2011 Best App Ever winners announced
Jeff Scott of 148 Apps has announced the winners for the Best App Ever for 2011, and you can review at the official site right now. Jetpack Joyride from Halfbrick was the overall winner in the iOS devision (which is a great app, but probably also benefited from actually promoting the Best App Ever vote inside the app itself). There are several other winners across various categories like Most Innovative (Codea), Most Useful (Amazon Mobile) and Best Time Killer (Tiny Wings). Scott tells us that 148 Apps received a record 1.5 million votes this year, which is three times the total of last year's choices. Before voting began, there were 287,643 nominations across 7,243 apps. This year also featured Android winners in many categories, but Scott says that iOS topped the Android votes by a factor of 10:1. The Best App Ever awards are always an excellent check of what's available on the App Store, so review the list and find some great new apps. Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to 148 Apps for putting the whole thing together.
Voting now open for Best App Ever awards
Voting has been opened up for the 2011 Best App Ever nominees. These awards have been put on every year for a few years now by our friends over at 148 Apps, and they feature many of the greatest apps you'll find on the iOS store, chosen by users. To vote on this year's awards, head over to the Best Apps Ever page, and choose your favorites from all of the various different categories from Best Overall App to the various technical choices in each category. For the first time I can remember, the awards also talk about Android apps this year, so if you have an Android device and some favorites on that side of the fence, be sure to represent over there as well. But despite the fact that Android is being honored, Best App Ever is still planning to announce the final winners later this month at Macworld, as usual. Voting is open until January 25, and be sure to put your votes in. We're curious to see which of these great apps is crowned with a win.
Best App Ever winners announced, Angry Birds wins big
148Apps' own Jeff Scott just handed me an actual piece of paper here in the Macworld press room, and on it there are all of the Best App Ever winners listed. You can read the full list online in PDF form, but we'll spoil a few of them for you. Best App Ever for 2010? None other than a little app you may have heard of called Angry Birds. Sure, it's not a choice too far off the reservation, but you have to admit that in terms of exposure and playtime, there was no real equal. Chillingo and Clickgamer also walked away with the most wins -- Angry Birds showed up on the list seven times in its various forms, and Cut the Rope also nabbed an award for Best Puzzle Game. Flipboard is the most award-winning non-game app of the bunch, picking up three awards, including Most Innovative App and Best Visual Design on the iPad. And Spacetime Studios' Pocket Legends, a full-featured iOS MMO that has received relatively little press so far, picked up three wins as well. There are lots and lots and lots of excellent apps in the various awards and their runner-ups and honorable mentions -- it's been a terrific year for the App Store, and in its third year running, the Best App Ever awards are a great indicator of what's popular and well-made out there.
148Apps creates an App Hall of Fame
Jeff Scott of 148Apps has finally revealed his App Hall of Fame project -- he started it up about a month ago, and asked a number of personalities around the iPhone/iPad app scene (including yours truly) to nominate and then vote on a few App Store apps, with the eventual goal of inducting them into a Hall of Fame. We made our nominations and voted a little while ago, and the first inductees into the store are now listed on the site: Angry Birds, Flight Control, Doodle Jump, Shazam, Evernote, Plants vs. Zombies, Pandora, Simplenote, the official Twitter app, Instapaper, Homerun Battle 3D, and Fieldrunners. You've probably heard of all of those already, but that's the point: the Hall of Fame aims to honor "the very best mobile applications and games." There will be 12 inductees honored every month going forward, so the collection should grow bigger pretty fast. The nomination process is all done by the selection committee (not the public), but if you want to follow along, you can sign up on the mailing list (and have a chance to win some of the nominees for free every month). It's a fun project -- the App Store has been around long enough now that some super popular apps have risen to the top, and this is a good way to keep track of the absolute cream of the crop over the App Store's whole life. At the same time, I'm sure we'll see some interesting decisions in the months to come, so stay tuned for that.
2008 Best iPhone App Ever winners announced
The voting only went underway a while ago, but they've just announced the winners for the 2008 Best App Ever awards, celebrating (according to 148apps.com and the people they got to nominate and vote in their contest) the best iPhone apps of last year. As I said for the voting, you can probably take most of this with a grain of salt, but there's no question that there are some awesome apps in here, and probably at least one or two you'll be interested in checking out if you haven't yet.Shazam won big in the "Best Overall", "Most Innovative," and "Best WOW" categories, and that is well worth it: Shazam is super reliable and works great as a "music recognizer." Rolando picked up "Best Game Graphics," and "Best Game Controls." Fieldrunners also picked up two awards for "Best Strategy Game" and "Best Long-play Game."Unfortunately, the much-despised (by me) Ocarina won three total awards, including "Best 99 cent app" (I would have chosen Koi Pond over that one easily and that's one where Weightbot was made to win), but feel free to ignore me and my iPhone app crankiness. There are lots of great iPhone apps here (especially when you dive into the nominations), and overall, we're looking at the best of a terrific first year of iPhone development. Onward to 2009!
