Yesterday, Apple presented what it described as a ‘special event’ in New York City where it highlighted the best games and apps of the year.
The ‘special event’ tag was perhaps a bit over-ambitious: the event was actually very low-key and did not bring any new operating system or product announcements.
As some readers might be aware, Apple keeps a New York City office where it conducts private press briefings and gives the odd presentation where new hardware and software is showcased.
Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman said that yesterday’s event focused on discussing the ‘back stories’ and the inspiration behind Apple’s latest products.As some observers predicted beforehand, the whole thing turned out to be rather dull.
There wasn’t a single software or hardware announcement.A picture subsequently appeared on social media (but has since been deleted) depicting an envelope changing hands at the event, with the caption: “And the winners are….”
The aim of the ‘special event’ seems to have been to give developers a chance to show off their latest applications to the media.Later on Monday night, however, Apple did make a formal announcement about the top apps of 2019.
Instead of doing this at the ‘special event’ though, it was done by way of a press release.The App of the Year title was won by Lux Optics’ photo app Spectre Camera.
Moleskine’s drawing and sketching app Flow by Moleskine was crowned as the iPad App of the Year.Serif Labs’ design app Affinity Publisher was the winner in the Mac App of the Year category.The Explorers Network’s ground-breaking app The Explorers was chosen as Apple TV App of the Year.
In the Games category, the winners were:
- iPhone: Thatgamecompany’s Sky: Children of the Light
- iPad: Abylight S.L.’s Hyper Light Drifter
- Mac: Nomada Studio/Devolver’s GRIS
- Apple TV: DotEmu’s Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap