Best designed apps

Last week we recapped all the new, shiny products and features Apple is working on. Today, we’re looking at some of the 2022 Apple Design Awards winners and finalists that the Product Hunt community has supported over the past year.

In the Inclusivity category, Procreate snatched its second award for its new accessibility features such as tremor and motion filtering, an in-app assistive touch menu, audio feedback, and color blindness settings. Other finalists include transcription and live translation for FaceTime app Navi and anagram game Letter Rooms.

Interaction Design winner Slopes uses the GPS on your iPhone or Apple Watch to keep a diary of your skiing and snowboarding. Gibbon (also a Social Impact winner), which we saw launch earlier this year, is “a hopeful game about the beauty of wilderness and the destructive force of human civilization.” Also notable in this category, Transit+ is a multimodal urban travel planning app, while Vectornator’s iPad app lets you design vector graphics.

Shinning a light on crucial issues, Rebel Girls shares the stories of history’s most influential women such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Simone Biles, and Frida Kahlo, through rich audio. We wrote more about it here. Empathy and Headspace were also nominated.

As far as Delightful and Fun apps go, (Not Boring) Habits took the stage with its habit-building app. If you’re looking for visually appealing graphics, Halide Mark II is a camera for your iPhone and iPad that offers an intuitive experience to both novices and experienced photographers.

Making use of Apple’s latest technology, Innovation Winners and finalists include Odio’s virtual 3D soundscape and Focus Noodles, an app that helps you focus by not allowing you to touch your phone.

• It’s tough to know how your Twitter Threads performed in full, so indie maker Dan Roden created full-thread analytics by ilo.

• Last year’s 2nd most upvoted product, Tango, just dropped an update with new features and a desktop app.

• Polite Pop offers a way to collect emails without obstructing content or disrupting a visitor’s experience.

• Finta is a new fundraising platform with deal rooms, an investor database, and an automated CRM.

As one maker put it, sometimes text is just not enough and video is too much. That’s why so many people love podcasts, and Pager is working to help teams harness the potential of podcasts for work teams.

The private podcast platform lets teams create audio stories and podcasts for things like onboarding series, leadership memos, on-demanding training, and so on.