Londoner David William Hearn is not a trained programmer. He has no university education when it comes to making software. And yet his musical notation app for iPad, StaffPad, just won a coveted Apple Design Award this week.

The iPad app gives composers and conductors powerful tools for writing and tweaking musical scores, and for sharing their changes instantly with musicians on a stage or in a recording studio. StaffPad places the iPad and Apple Pencil squarely in the center of the collaborative creative process.

Here’s how Hearn and his team created their award-winning music-notation app.

The eight winners of this year’s Apple Design Awards showcase “outstanding app design, innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement,” the company said Monday.

Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said the four apps and four games honored “inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.”

Apple has revealed the winners of its prestigious 21st Apple Design Awards, offering a nice boost to the indie developers in question and some good recommendations for users.

The awards span nine different countries and a variety of app types, from note-taking apps to games. Check out the winners below.

Apple has published its WWDC schedule ahead of kickoff on Monday morning, but there’s one glaring omission. The company’s annual Apple Design Awards is nowhere to be found.

Most Apple fans don’t start drooling at the mention of speech-recognition APIs, Xcode thread sanitizers, Metal tessellation or Pixar USD model support. However, if you’re a developer, those can be huge game-changers that mean you can make your apps better than ever.

While Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2016 keynote revealed loads of fresh features coming in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra — including some amazing stuff that should delight iPhone, iPad and Mac owners when the final versions launch this fall — developers watching Monday’s event saw tons of seemingly minor updates that will let them make apps better than ever.

To find out what the little updates could mean for typical users, Cult of Mac asked some of this year’s Apple Design Award winners what WWDC additions they’re most excited about.

Here’s what they told us.

The Apple Design Award winners are in, and they showcase the cutting edge of game and app design.

At a ceremony Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple handed out 12 awards to the best apps of the past year. Games scored half of the nods, with some really cool productivity, finance and utility apps also taking honors.

Here are all of this year’s winning apps — and why they won.

When Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen set out to make a task manager for the iPhone, they were both 16 years old. Now they’ve won a 2013 Apple Design Award for Finish, their app that specializes in combating procrastination.

Today, version 2.0 of Finish landed in the App Store, and among a design refresh, the update packs a ton of new features.

Every year a few quality apps are selected to win the coveted Apple Design Award at WWDC. It’s a developer’s dream to be recognized by Apple for making great software, and the Design Award is the pinnacle of accolades in the Apple developer community. This year’s winners include some very popular titles you may have heard of, like Letterpress and the newest iOS version of Evernote.

Ironically, one of the apps Apple selected for a Design Award this year has been killed in iOS 7.