Hi, I'm John Geleynsse, Director of Technology Evangelism at Apple. With more and more apps on the App Store every day, it's important to take your app to the next level to get noticed. In this video, I'll show you some great apps on the App Store today that set new standards in usability, design, and innovation. These examples will help you to understand the characteristics and key ingredients that make apps really great. So let's get started.

Here are the seven ingredients that we've seen in some of the best apps on the App Store and as we've worked with countless developers creating apps for iPhone and iPad over the past few years. As you design and create your iOS app, be sure to incorporate as many of these ingredients as possible.

Let's look at these one by one. First of all, great iPhone and iPad apps are delightful. They draw you in, they keep you satisfied, and leave you with a great experience. Making you come back again and again. Delightful apps do this in several ways. First, they're inviting. They have an attractive design that leaves a great first impression. So be sure that your app leaves a great first impression with users. Delightful apps are also intuitive. This means that people know exactly what to do when they first launch them and never need to consult a manual or any other help.

Intuitive apps are designed with users in mind and they're organized in ways that meet user expectations. So the question is this: is your app intuitive or is it difficult for people to use? Delightful apps are also engaging. This means that they keep people coming back for more. Your app should meet a need so effectively and provide so much value that users come back again and again.

Delightful apps are also enabling. Meaning they allow people to do things they couldn't do before. I mean, think about this for a moment. How will your app do this? How will your app do what it does in a way that's never been done before? And finally, delightful apps are exciting. This means they generate enthusiasm in people, they have flair, and they show great attention to detail.

And in my experience, apps in any category of the App Store can be exciting. Here's a great example of a very inviting casual game called Dizzy B by Igloo Games. This app leaves you with a very happy first impression. It's attractive, has bright and friendly colors, very cute sounds, and is very responsive. And a whole lot of fun to play.

And keep in mind, these are really valuable attributes to have, even if your app isn't a game. Here's another really inviting game called Carcassonne. It's just like the real board game, which many families and friends like to play. If you've ever played the real board game and then discovered this app on the App Store, you won't be disappointed.

Carcassonne for iPad uses high-quality textures and visual elements from the real board game that look fantastic on iPad. The production value of your app's artwork should be as high-quality as possible, too. And, wherever possible, your app should mimic the real world or try to reflect elements of what people are used to when they're doing the things your app does.

Here's Time Tuner by Dream Surface. It's a bedside clock radio with location-awareness, and it's also a great way to get your app to work. It's also a great way to get your app to work. It's also a great way to get your app to work. It's a great way to get your app to work. It's a great app that's super intuitive and does one thing so well, it could become a replacement for the real thing for some people. Your app should do one thing well and not try to do too many things.

Now, here's an example of an engaging app. Remember, engaging means that the app keeps you coming back again and again. This is Tab Toolkit by Agile Partners. It won an Apple Design Award in 2010. It lets you download and sync tablature files from the web to your iPad, and then use them to learn how to play a piano or chord a guitar. It looks like sheet music, and yet offers the ability to change instruments, change tempo, isolate left hand or right hand, bass guitar or lead guitar, and much more. And it's these capabilities, combined with lots of valuable content, that keep users coming back for more.

So what will your app do to be sticky and bring people back time and again? And finally, here's an example of an exciting app. It's the Jamie Oliver 20-Minute Meals app for iPhone. It too won an Apple Design Award in 2010. It lets you pick great recipes, manage their ingredients, organize grocery lists, watch streaming videos, and follow detailed step-by-step instructions. And the visual design of this app is really attractive. Great production value. It's nicely organized and it uses the latest technologies on iOS. That's what great apps do.

But what sets this app apart is its attention to detail. Because when you're following a recipe step-by-step and then rotate the iPhone, you get a larger, more legible presentation of instructions. And then, if you tap the screen on the left, you get a photo of how the food should appear at that stage in the recipe.

I mean, how cool is that? That's not what you'd expect. And as a result, it surprises and excites. Great apps sweat the details. So how will your app exceed user expectations? So that's Delightful, the first of seven essential ingredients for great apps. Great iPhone and iPad apps are innovative. By innovation I mean groundbreaking, jaw-dropping, category defining. I mean really inspirational apps and apps that are a breath of fresh air.

Take Flight Control by FireMint. It's a highly addictive air traffic control app which is used multi-touch to allow you to tap an incoming airplane and drag a path to the runway matching the airplane's color. If two planes are going to collide, you can tap one of them and drag a new flight path.

It's simple to learn, easy to play, and super addictive. Now, the innovative thing about this app is that at the moment it arrived on the App Store, it defined a completely new genre of gaming. Until then, no one had ever done an app with that type of interaction model.

Your goal should be to create a genre-defining app too. Here's another really great example of an innovative app. This is Peaks by Augmented Outdoors, an app that lets you identify mountains by triangulating iPhone's GPS location, compass bearing, and accelerometer to accurately determine which direction you're looking and how far away you are from a mountain.

It then tells you the name, height, and distance of the mountain you're looking at. How cool is that? Before iOS and the App Store, we couldn't imagine these types of innovative solutions. And now there are more and more augmented reality apps every day transforming how we use our iPhones and iPads and changing the way we get things done.

How will you take advantage of similar hardware and software features of iPhone, iPad and iOS to augment what your app does? Here's an augmented reality app for golfers. This is Golfscape by ShotZoom Software LLC. Hold this app up as you look down the fairway and it will tell you how far away the green is and what obstacles and traps exist and where they are.

Amazing! Great apps exceed users' expectations. Yours should too. Here's Zipcar. This is car rental without the countertops, the agents, the parking lots or any of that stuff. It lets people find the nearest available Zipcar and reserve it. And then as you walk towards the vehicle and get nearby, the app displays a key fob so you can unlock the doors and honk the horn.

That's awesome! It's great apps like this that get noticed. And here's a fantastic new app that recently appeared on the App Store. It's called Word Lens by Quest Visual. This is unbelievable innovation. It translates English to Spanish and back on the fly. It maintains relative font size, color, thickness and transparency and background color. Watch this carefully.

Isn't that amazing? Great apps like this are unforgettable. And then there's Doodle Jump, an incredibly addictive app that has several innovations worth noting. First, a simple swipe to change themes instead of a more modal approach. Second, in-game leaderboards. And third, they do regular updates with new themes and creatures and gameplay, keeping users coming back for more. Great apps make things simple and constantly provide users with great value. And the last example of innovation is Scrabble by Electronic Arts. Check this out. So here we have two people playing a game of Scrabble using their iPads. Lots of fun.

But check this out. You can manage your letters in private on your iPhone or iPod Touch and then move them to the main board with a simple flick gesture. What a riot! With 160 million iOS devices out there, people are looking for really great software to take advantage of the iPhones and iPads that they already have. And so these are a few examples of really innovative apps. So the question is this: What innovations will you build into your app? Now, let's talk about optimization.

Great iPhone and iPad apps are also optimized. Now optimization means several things. First, it means that great apps are high quality. This means they function as designed. They're robust. They're stable. They're reliable. They're just what people expect on iPhone and iPad. Optimization also means that you make sure your app delivers maximum performance. It launches quickly, it's really responsive, and it's super efficient.

Optimization also means optimizing your app's integration with iOS technologies. That means using as many of the powerful built-in frameworks as you can to deliver rich functionality rather than writing your own duplicate frameworks. And here are some of the frameworks available to your app on iOS, but there are many, many more within the SDK. These frameworks are what we use to develop iOS itself and what we use for built-in apps like Safari, Mail, Photos, and more.

These are mature, stable, hardware accelerated. They're localized and accessible, so using them means your app will be these things too. Lastly, optimizing your app means building something that's made specifically for iOS. And targeted at the iPhone or iPad, rather than developing something that's cross-platform and lowest common denominator. Now here's a great example of an app designed specifically for iPad. It's Infinity Blade by Chair Entertainment Group. It has incredible gameplay, unbelievable performance, and stunning high-res graphics.

This is an app that's only possible because it was developed for iPad. Here's another example of an app designed specifically for iPad. This is Inkling, an interactive textbook app that offers students interactivity, social collaboration, tutorials and quizzes, and simple ease of use, only possible on iPad. And then there's The Elements by Theodore Gray, an interactive periodic table of the Elements textbook offering content not previously available in digital form. for iPad.

So the challenge is this: be sure to optimize your app in all of the ways we just mentioned. Avoid just building something and hoping it's good enough. Now, onto connected. Great iPhone and iPad apps are connected, and there are three aspects to this. The first is to ensure that your app works well with other apps. If your app displays a telephone number, people should be able to tap that number and initiate a phone call if they're on iPhone.

If your app displays a web address, people should be able to view that content within your app using a UI web view or be automatically sent to Safari to browse the content there. And the same concept applies to street addresses and other location information. Either display this information within your app using Map Kit or allow people to switch out to the Maps app.

The second aspect of connectedness is to ensure that, where appropriate, your app is connected with the personal information available on the user's device. Contacts, photos and more can be used by your app, making it far more integrated and personal. And the third aspect of being connected, and the focal point for this section of the presentation, is that your app can reach out beyond itself to add more value for people.

For example, there are millions of iPhones out there that your app can connect to. Here's the Starbucks app. It looks great and it's super easy to use. Among other things, it lets you create your favorite Starbucks drink, so that when your colleague, friend, or family member is making a Starbucks run, you can connect to their iPhone and send them your drink order.

This is a simple example of how to connect with others for a very practical reason. And it's a clever way of getting people to notice and remember your app. Could your app benefit from being able to do a digital handshake and exchange information this way? Here's iPad to iPad. I mentioned this app before, it's Scrabble from Electronic Arts. But it's a great example not only of innovation, but of connectedness between iPads via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to really enhance the gameplay.

Connecting your app on iPhone with a companion app on Mac OS X can also add lots of value for people. Here's Billings Touch by Market Circle. This is a very capable time tracking app for anyone who wants to manage billing against projects or clients. On its own, it's really great.

But combined with a companion app on the Mac called Billings Mac OS X means people can have data automatically synced so that they can take advantage of the power of the desktop to, for example, design and print an invoice. And a similar example, this time between iPhone, iPad and the Mac, is Things by Cultured Code, a very flexible, really well designed GTD getting things done to do manager app which automatically synchronizes tasks and projects between these devices directly, providing users with excellent functionality and mobility. This is definitely an example worth following.

And this is SkyGrid, a great app with consistently high app store ratings that keeps people up to date on the things that they care about. This app on iPhone and iPad is a great example of how reaching out beyond the device can add lots of value for users.

And the last example is Flight Board by Ben Cazaz, an app that provides flight departure and arrival information using a really accurate reproduction of a flight board. It's a simple, extremely well done example of an app that reaches out beyond the device to connect with more information of value to users.

That's connected. Now, number five. Great iPhone and iPad apps are accessible. Building accessibility in your app means that everyone will be able to use it, which is important whether your app is for in-house use by employees or for anyone in the app store. Now here are some interesting stats for the US that are likely similar to the rest of the world. First of all, 10 million people are visually impaired.

31 million people are hearing impaired. And some 12 million have a learning disability. For example, they might have dyslexia and so will misinterpret what they see on the screen in your app. So, all told, that's one in five users. Or one in five employees. Or one in five of your customers. Basically, 50 million people who won't be able to use your app at all or who will have difficulty using it unless you make it accessible.

The good news is that accessibility is built into iOS and integrated into numerous frameworks, including UIKit, for example. Your job is to simply follow the documentation and add accessibility wherever you can to your app. And in return, the Accessibility Framework will enable powerful new capabilities in your app, including voiceover and much more. Great iPhone and iPad apps are accessible so that everyone can use them.

Great iPhone and iPad apps are localized. It's more important than ever for your app to be usable by people everywhere, since the App Store is now in more than 90 countries. We live in a global village with many, many languages being spoken in each country. Reaching all of these people in their language of choice is a great way to make sure that your app has as broad a reach as possible.

So localize your UI for as many languages as possible. Here's things for iPhone by Cultured Code, available in English, German, and French. and even more languages. Localization can be restricted to the basic UI of your app, but can extend to all of your content too, if that makes sense. Every little bit helps, and iOS makes it easy to include all of the translations within the same binary, so that there's still only one app that users need to download.

And finally, great iPhone and iPad apps are designed. This means focusing on delivering the optimal interaction design, meaning how the app works and what happens when things are tapped. And focusing on a strong visual design, meaning how the app looks and presents information. Let's begin with a great quote by Adam Angst. He says, "The iPad becomes the app you're using.

Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that's not magic, I don't know what is." I love this quote because it's been my own experience and it provides a great backdrop for a discussion on design. Here are a few examples that illustrate this point. Here's maps on iPad. iPad becomes a digital map.

Here's Notes on iPad. iPad becomes a classic paper notepad. Here's Calendar app. iPad becomes a day timer. Here's Contacts. iPad becomes an address book. Notice there's no menu bar, no windowing system, no file system, or any of the encumbrances of a traditional computing experience. The only thing that matters is the app that's running.

This is NPR, National Public Radio, for iPad. It combines their radio broadcasts with their excellent online content. iPad becomes the best NPR experience ever. And here's a point of sale system called Square for iPhone and iPad that's really attractive, easy to use, and allows anyone to take credit card payments. Totally transformative for small business. iPad becomes a point of sale system. Here's Marvel Comics, a fantastic digital comic reading experience on iPad. iPad becomes a comic book. And here's AmpliTube Fender by Agile Partners. iPad becomes a Fender guitar amp and effects modeler.

How beautiful is that? And so, as you can see, each app takes over the iPad screen and the device becomes your app. It becomes whatever you want it to be. This is why design matters so much. It's vital that your app works exactly as users would expect it to, and that it has the attention to detail and polish needed to surprise and delight.

These are the seven ingredients of great iPhone and iPad apps. So there you go. There are definitely many more app examples I could have talked about since there are lots of really great apps on the App Store. And there are probably other valuable ingredients we could discuss too. But the ones I've covered here are the ones you should begin incorporating into your app today. I look forward to seeing the next great version of your app and hearing about any questions you have and about your experience developing for iOS.