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Nominate your favorite iPhone utility app for TUAW's Best of 2011
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. It's hard to believe, but we're now halfway through the nominations for TUAW's Best of 2011. Today's category for nominations is iPhone utility apps. Utilities are the apps that accomplish many of the tasks that should have been built into every iPhone, and they make the iPhone much more useful than it already is. It's one of the largest categories on the App Store, with almost 15,000 entries in the US App Store alone. Is your favorite app in this category? Whether it's a better calculator, a flashlight app, or a web browser that handles Flash video through a proxy server, the utilities category probably has it. There are a huge variety of apps in the utilities category, so I'm not going to even give you the requisite handful of ideas. Be sure to check the App Store to make sure your choice is in the utilities category -- any nominations that aren't in that category will be removed from the final voting. TUAW wants to hear from you -- what's your favorite iPhone utility app? Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon! Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 21, 2011.
Best of 2011 nominations: iPhone productivity apps
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for TUAW Best of 2011 nominations is iPhone productivity apps. Sure, the iPhone is fun and it's wonderful for keeping in touch with friends and family. But it's also a productivity tool that goes everywhere with you. What apps are included in this category? Well, according to the App Store on the evening of December 18, 2011, there were a total of 6,464 apps in the productivity category. Will Apple's Pages ($9.99), Numbers ($9.99), or Keynote ($9.99) take the prize? Evernote (free) works on the iPhone as well, and it was the winner of our TUAW Best of 2011 award for Mac productivity apps. Will Evernote grab the award on the iPhone as well? Or will Dropbox (free) pick up the award this time? Mac and PC owners both love to control their personal computers from anywhere, and LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99) could be a fan favorite in the productivity category. Perhaps Microsoft will pick up a winner with the new SkyDrive (free) cloud storage app. TUAW wants to hear from you -- what's your favorite iPhone productivity app for keeping you up to speed with your workload? Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon! Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 20, 2011.
Best of 2011 nominations: iPhone games
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for TUAW Best of 2011 nominations is iPhone games. With over 500,000 apps in the iOS app store, there are plenty of games to choose from, and literally hundreds that became popular in 2011. Infinity Blade II ($6.99) was an App Store game of the week, so perhaps it deserves your nomination for the best iPhone game of the year. First Person Shooter fans love Gameloft's Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation ($6.99) on the iPhone, while Swampy the Alligator has captured the hearts of adults and kids alike in Where's My Water? ($0.99). Board game fans have been ecstatic about Carcassone ($9.99), while World of Goo ($2.99) continued to gain fans of all ages during 2011. Whatever your favorite iPhone game is, we want to hear about it. Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon! Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 17, 2011.
Best of 2011 Nominations: iPhone accessories
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. The Mac nominations are done, and now we're shifting our attention to iPhones. Today's category for Best of 2011 nominations is iPhone accessories. This is a huge category, including protective cases from thin skins to completely waterproof cases that can take a dunking or a drop off the top of a moving car; battery packs; alarm and speaker docks; radio controlled cars and helicopters; car chargers; keyboards; guitar inputs; you name it! To get an idea of what's in this category, just take a look at the Apple Store iPhone accessory listings to see what's in there. Whatever your favorite iPhone accessory is, we want to hear about it. Leave your nomination in the comments below. Voting will start soon! Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 16, 2011.
Best of 2011 Nominations: Mac photo / video apps
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for Best of 2011 nominations is Mac photo and video apps. Your Mac can manage thousands of photos and help you to create video masterpieces, so this is a crowded category. You might be a fan of Apple's iPhoto (US$14.99) or Aperture ($79.99) apps. Maybe you love to create HDR images with HDR Darkroom (on sale for $7.99) or apply stunning effects with FX Photo Studio ($9.99). The ease of use of Flare ($19.99) might be more your cup of coffee. Video fans might be excited about Apple's iMovie '11 ($14.99) or Final Cut Pro X ($299.99). Perhaps you're developing screencasts and use either ScreenFlow ($99.99) or Camtasia 2 ($99.99) in your work. Whatever your favorite Mac photo or video app is, we want to hear about it. Leave your nomination in the comments below. This is the last Mac-specific category for the 2011 awards -- tomorrow we'll begin gathering nominations for iPhone apps and accessories. Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 15, 2011.
Best of 2011 Nominations: Mac game apps
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for Best of 2011 nominations is Mac game apps. The Mac has gained in popularity as a gaming platform over the past few years, and there are a number of excellent titles that have been keeping Mac users happy this last 12 months. Perhaps it's the Angry Birds franchise that keeps you from doing work, or maybe you're busy with Civilization V: Campaign Edition. The dark backstory of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas might have your attention, and fans of the Star Wars universe can always nominate Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as their favorite. And who can forget Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? It's time for gamers to nominate their favorite title of 2011 for special attention from TUAW. Just leave a comment below with your favorite game, and we'll see which titles seem to be the most popular. In a few days, you'll have your opportunity to vote for the best Mac game of 2011. Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 11, 2011.
Best of 2011 Nominations: The best Mac model of the year
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. For our first category in the TUAW Best of 2011, we'd like you to nominate what you consider to be the best Mac model sold by Apple during the year. You don't need to give us the RAM amount and size of the SSD -- just list the model name (and screen size, if applicable) in your comment, and add your personal reasons why you think that your nomination deserves to win. Which Mac will take home the honor for 2011? Will it be the diminutive 11" MacBook Air, or the equally tiny Mac mini? How about the 17" MacBook Pro or the 27" iMac? Perhaps it's the aging but still powerful Mac Pro that is the Apple of your eye. Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 7, 2011.
Game Developers Choice Online Awards announces finalists, EQ to be ushered into Hall of Fame
It's not quite to the prestigious level of the Academy Awards -- yet -- but the Game Developers Choice Online Awards is fast becoming one of the more well-known and highly respected award ceremonies in the MMO world while only being in its second year. With October 12th's ceremony coming soon, the field has been narrowed by 400 industry leaders into a competitive pool of nominees in a dozen categories. The categories include Best Online Visual Arts, Best Social Network Game, Best Online Game Design, Online Innovation, Best Online Technology, Best Community Relations, Best Audio For An Online Game, Best New Online Game, and Best Live Game. Several popular MMOs, including RIFT, DC Universe Online, World of Tanks and Wizard101, are up for a possible award. In addition, the awards will recognize Kesmai Corporation founders John Taylor and Kelton Flinn for the Online Game Legend Award. EverQuest, too, will be getting its long-overdue kudos as it is ushered into the Hall of Fame. We'll be anxious to see which games grab the gold this fall, but until then we're just going to grouse that we weren't tapped to be one of the judges.
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.
Ngmoco's iPhone titles nominated for a few GDC Online awards
Nominations have been announced for the Game Developers Choice Online Awards (to be announced at the upcoming GDC Online conference in Austin), and iPhone developer Ngmoco has secured a few spots in among the rest of the big PC game developers. We Rule picked up nominations for Best Online Game Design, Best Online Audio, and Best New Online Game, and Godfinger was recognized in the Best Online Visual Arts category. iPhone developers Booyah and Digital Chocolate also got nominated, but both of those companies were chosen for their Facebook titles, not their iPhone creations. So congrats to Ngmoco -- the company has certainly made a splash on the App Store with its freemium model, but these nominations show that former EA exec Neil Young's company is competing on quality with much larger PC titles like League of Legends, Aion and Dungeon Fighter Online. The awards will be given out at GDC Online, taking place October 5-8 in Austin, Texas.
Blizzard wins big at MI6
Medievaldragon has all the results from the recent MI6 marketing conference (where Blizzard was nominated for a number of awards), and apparently it's a clean sweep: Blizzard won in all six awards they were nominated in. Pretty impressive -- they won for overall marketing on Wrath of the Lich King (which seemed like a tough category for them), best product packaging for the expansion and best product logo for Diablo III, as well as two awards for their TV campaign, including best writing on the Ozzy Osbourne commercial.Very impressive across the board. Congrats to Blizzard on all their wins yet again.
MI6 marketing awards nominate Blizzard in six categories
Get ready to put a few more awards on the (ever-growing) shelf, Blizzard -- MI6, which is a conference about marketing video games, has nominated Blizzard in no less than six different categories for all of their marketing of Wrath of the Lich King. Everything from the Wrath of the Lich King launch campaign in general to the Diablo III logo specifically has been nominated for an award. The TV spots have gotten special attention, too -- the entire "What's your game?" campaign is nominated, as is the Ozzy Osbourne spot in two different categories, for best writing and oustanding TV or theatrical ad.You can download the full list of finalists over on the MI6 site -- the rest of the nominations are kind off all over the place, though the marketing for Fallout 3 is in there quite a bit, including up against Blizzard for best writing, and best overall marketing campaign. The awards are going down in San Francisco on April 8th -- good luck to Blizzard on all of their hard work.We still do have one request though: for the next ad, can we maybe get a girl who plays WoW? Sure, a Gnome in the cinematics would be nice, too, but so far, on the TV commercials, it's been all dudes.
WotLK nominated for BAFTA, wins one out of three at AIAS
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has been nominated for yet another award -- this time, Wrath has received a nod for Best Game of the Year by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Videogame awards. UK residents can vote for the game right now over on their site, and a nice set of prizes, including a big TV, a Playstation 3, and copies of all ten nominated games going to one lucky voter. Voting is closed on March 9th, and the winners should be announced soon after that.And in case you've been wondering about the AIAS nominations we mentioned a little while ago, Blizzard is going about 33%. While they did win the award for best MMO game of the year (beating out Warhammer Online), Wrath of the Lich King lost its other two categories -- Left 4 Dead was awarded Best Computer Game, and Metal Gear Solid 4 won for Best Music over the Lich King's silky tones.Guess you can't win them all. But considering that the second expansion of a years-old MMO is still garnering honors, Blizzard has nothing to be ashamed of.[via WorldofWar]
iPhone is dominating independent gaming
Our friends at Joystiq make a very insightful and very telling discovery: the iPhone more or less owns the finalist list for the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile category. 11 of the 14 contestants aren't on the Nintendo DS or PSP -- they're built and played on the iPhone and the iPod touch. The popular Fieldrunners and Igloo Games' Dizzy Bee are standouts, but even innovative games like Galcon and the pseudogame experience Ruben and Lullaby are being honored with nods.Very, very telling -- the relatively low cost of entry into the App Store and the versatility of Apple's SDK makes the iPhone/iPod touch a dream platform for independent game developers, and clearly, even with less than a year of development time, Apple's handheld is making a big splash in the industry. Sure, there's still a few pricing hiccups that need to be worked out to get bigger developers on board in a big way, but for smaller and single person independent game developers, there's never been a better platform on which to make and market your games.
Blizzard cinematic artists nominated for VES awards
Blizzard's cinematic team deserves as many awards as they can get, in this writer's humble opinion. Even back in the Starcraft days, when graphics were 2D and it was all sprites and jumpy animation, the cinematics were exquisite. And now they've been nominated for yet another award-- Blizzard says their team has been nominated to receive honors from the Visual Effects Society's 6th Annual Awards for the Burning Crusade's cinematic seen above. And I don't disagree-- even more than a year (and a few runs through ten levels of Outland) after it's come out, Illidan's growl still rocks.And man oh man I can't wait for the Wrath cinematic. As fun as it was to see Blood Elves, Draenei, and Illidan and the Skull of Gul'dan, seeing Arthas in cinematic form again is going to be even more awesome.
2008 Bloggies nominations now open
This is a friendly reminder that nominations for the 2008 Weblog Awards (a.k.a. "the Bloggies") are now open, with dozens of empty text boxes just waiting for your input. There are actually a number of categories in which this scrappy young publication would seem to fit nicely, such as best sports blog perhaps (just take a look at this selection), or maybe best gossip blog (again, our record speaks for itself). Not that we would be so bold as to try and influence your selections in any way, so we'll simply point you to the Read link and wave goodbye with our biggest, toothiest, most political smile.
GuildCafe seeking nominations for Espresso Awards
Sam from Uberguilds sent us word of nominations opening up for GuildCafe's Espresso awards (they're the same company now, remember?). They're looking for your ideas on choosing the best of the year in a number of different categories, including everything from "best gaming blog" to "best user-interface mod" and "best player-written guide."Unfortunately, there's two problems here-- despite coming from GuildCafe, the awards don't seem to be aimed just at MMOs. They have a "player-created map" category, and unless they're talking about Second Life sims, that's not really MMO-centric. And they have strange qualifications for the fansite and gaming blog categories-- in my mind, getting fairly compensated for writing about games doesn't make your work meaningless. (Disclaimer: everyone who writes for Massively gets paid for their work by Weblogs, Inc, which is a division of AOL.)But hey, it's their awards, their rules. You readers are smart folks-- go put some good nominations in there and we'll see what GuildCafe comes up with.
The Daily Grind: MMO of the Year nominations
1UP wants to know your game of the year (Portal's got my vote still, but my dead Xbox has kept me from playing Mass Effect), but this is Massively, so let's get our own nominations rolling: what's the MMO of the year?Burning Crusade? Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar? Dungeon Runners? Tabula Rasa? Fury? (snicker) What's the best MMO you've played in 2007?Warhammer Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea aren't eligible, of course-- they both come out in 2008. And remember that this is just nominations for an award that we're not actually giving out (or should we? hmmmm), so you can name as many or as few games as you like. And who knows if patches should count, either-- should EVE: Trinity be on the list? But if you were voting for MMO of the Year in 2007 right now, what would be your pick?
Macworld Editors' and Readers' Choice awards voting begins
Macworld has announced that they're looking for nominations and votes for their fourth annual Reader's Choice awards-- they're asking interested parties to drop a note over on this forum thread in the categories of Apple Product of the Year, Third Party Hardware and Software of the Year, and Mac Gem of the Year (an under-$50 software out there that deserves more recognition than it usually gets).As I suspected, there's no question about Apple Product of the Year: it's definitely the Hi-Fi. Wait, no, I mean it's definitely the iPhone. Duh. And the rest of the votes are literally all over the place, from Parallels, Adobe's suites, and even Leopard (despite not actually being from a third party, but maybe it's just that good) to smaller stuff like Panic's Coda and Gus Mueller's Acorn. I gotta say good luck to Macworld's editors-- they're going to need it to come up with some good award winners from that mess.But they've got time-- the awards probably won't drop until mid-December. And by then, we'll all have used Leopard enough to know that it is the software product of the year, third-party or otherwise.
Girl Gamer Award nominations for 2006 -- 2007 out today
Several different girl gaming networks and groups have pulled together a mass of games from different sites, forums, and other networks devoted to female gamers, and have put together this list of the final nominees. While they encourage female gamers to log in and vote, it doesn't look like they'll be screening for X or Y chromosomes at login.We've recently been talking about developing and marketing games for females, and this is a great example of how to do that -- find out what they're playing, not tell them what they should be playing. However, in all honesty ... this looks like a list of games that could have been pulled together from sites populated by only male gamers. Further proving that the line between girl gamers and guy gamers is something created by PR and marketing, not the people who play the games.Our advice? Open up the voting to everyone, but have them identify which sex they are (Austin Powers: "Yes, please!) from the outset. Once the awards are done, give us the winners, and show us how the demographics break down by sex, age, toothbrush color, favorite type of pizza, etc. That way the marketers will see we're all just playing games.
