Every year Apple picks the very best apps in the App Store as recipients of its prestigious Apple Design Awards (ADAs). iPhone apps like Infinity Blade and Mac apps like Pixelmator won last year, and this year’s winners are just as good.

11 apps were awarded ADAs today by Apple at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California during WWDC. The awards are meant to “celebrate excellence and recognize the outstanding work of iOS and OS X developers.”

Here are the winners of the 2012 ADAs:

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It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of Apple events: the secrecy, the frenetic guessing games, the lines at Starbuck’s. It’s like Christmas–before your older brother ruined Santa for you–and it happens a couple of times a year.

So Cult of Mac got the inside scoop from developer Chris Lott, who was sitting inside on this unusually warm San Francisco day with a restless crowd of developers at the World Wide Developer Conference, for his take on the keynote announcements. Lott works with Darren Murtha Design; the two currently have eight iPhone/iPad apps in the iTunes store, most of them nifty learning games aimed at the preschool set.

In less than an hour after the presentation itself, Apple has made the entire WWDC 2012 keynote available for streaming online. The video recording should be hitting Apple’s keynote feed in iTunes at any moment.

You can watch today’s keynote now on Apple’s website. For everything that was announced at WWDC today, check out our complete roundup.

Wow! Apple just unleashed a thunderstorm of new products and software on the world. Our heads are still spinning trying to keep up with all the new awesome features but we’ve managed to compile a list of everything Apple just announced at today’s WWDC keynote so you know all about the goodies coming your way. Take a look and see what you might have missed.

As expected, iOS 6 will be available to developers today in the first release preview. Stay tuned for our first look.

It’ll work on the iPhone 3GS and later, iPad 2 & iPad 3, and iPod touch fourth-gen.

It’s coming this fall, along with the iPhone 5.

Image: GDGT

Apple announced a lot of cool features in iOS 6 today, but here’s some of the stuff they didn’t show worth noting:

• Improved privacy controls.
• Redesigned stores
• Lost mode: if you’ve lost or misplaced your iPhone or iPad, you can send a phone number directly to that phone
• Game center challenges
• Per-account Mail signatures
• Voice-Over imrpovements
• Personal dictionary in iCloud
• Tons of new APIs for Devs, including Pass Kit, in-app contrent purchases (sell iTunes music right through your apps), transit apps

Image: Ars Technica

Verifying the rumors we’ve been hearing for months, Apple has officially unveiled its totally new Maps application for iOS 6. Scott Forstall demoed the app onstage today at WWDC. “In iOS 6, we’ve built an entirely new mapping solution from the ground up, and it is beautiful,” said Forstall. “We’re doing all the cartography ourselves. This is a worldwide effort. We’re covering the world.” This includes 100 million business listings worldwide.

It looks like Google Maps has indeed been kicked to the curb.

Among the new backend, the new Maps app will feature an integrated traffic service, turn-by-turn navigation, Siri integration, an enhanced 3D view called “Flyover.”

Apple has just unveiled a major new app: Passbook. And it looks like it could be the groundwork for the famed iWallet.

The idea here is simple: a single repository for all of your passes. Plane tickets, movie tickets, store cards, you name it.

Passbook even has QR code support. And any pass stored in it has live information displayed alongside it: for example, if you have a ticket pass, the time until departure is then shown inside of the app.

And, of course, all of these cards and passes are accessible at your local business with just a wave. Boy, all they need to add is credit card support and Apple’s got its NFC approach squared away, don’t you think?

Image: GDGT

“Safari is the best and most popular on the planet. About two thirds of all mobile traffic comes from Safari in iOS,” said Scott Forstall today at WWDC. Tabs are now synced across iCloud, and there’s an Offline Reading List mode for Safari in iOS 6.

“We also adding the ability to upload photos right from Safari to your favorite websites,” said Forstall. The integration works like a desktop browser for adding photos in web fields. There’s also fullscreen Safari mode for landscape orientation.

The new Safari will ship in iOS 6 later this year.