An Indian app developer, Raja Vijayaraman, was honoured at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) organised by Apple in San Jose, California on 4 June. The Chennai-based developer won an Apple Design Award for Calzy 3, a smart and personalised calculation app designed for everyday purposes.
“Calzy 3 is a highly customisable calculator that uses iOS technologies to offer features like Multitasking, Face ID and Touch ID to privately view saved history and bookmarks, Drag and drop to share results in other apps, iMessage integration, Spotlight search for bookmarked results, iCloud Sync and Handoff, to help you perform day to day mathematical calculations in a more elegant way,” according to an official statement by Apple.
After the award was announced Vijayaraman responded with this tweet: “Today people across 150+ countries use my apps and I just received an Apple Design Award. Thanks to Apple’s AppStore and huge shout out to Apple community for being passionate, inspiring and helpful. Still can’t believe it happened.”
In another follow-up tweet, Vijayaraman recalled his early days of struggle as an independent app designer: “When I started this journey five years back, I had no contacts, zero experience selling software, no college degree on programming and UI/UX designing. The only assets I had was-an understandable family and a friend, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and some passion to do apps.”
In an email to Guardian 20, Vijayaraman stated, “I started app development for the love of the iPhone and created apps that I felt there was a need for. But I never thought I would make it to this stage, and finally win the ‘Apple Nobel’. I am elated, pleasantly surprised and humbled. This is a dream come true!”
Calzy 3 comes with several dark and light colour scheme options to customise the keypad layout and 3D-touch buttons. It offers advanced scientific functions, and provides users with a privacy mode that includes Face ID and touch ID support.
The app can be used on any Apple device, including the iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad. Users can also switch devices and resume their old Calzy sessions. This smart app also comes with features like haptic feedback, Tax+ and Tax- functions, quick toggle for both decimal and currency rounding, smart parenthesis, spotlight search, and external keyboard support among other things.
One of the highlights of this app is the “memory area”, a feature that allows users to store multiple numerical values and use them whenever required. The stored values can be reused during any long calculation session, with a simple drag and drop option. Moreover, the app allows users to save values with date and title for future reference. This is also known as Calzy’s bookmark feature. So if you find yourself stuck routinely in some long and complicated calculation—say, while doing your annual taxes—Calzy 3 can make life simpler with its easy-to-navigate user interface and its database of stored values.
Another important feature of Calzy 3 is that it can render calculation results in 65 languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese and so on.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is among the most prominent forums globally for showcasing engineering talent. And an Apple Design Award can be a huge turning point in the life of any independent developer.
At this year’s edition of the WWDC, developers from all over the world were among the awardees. Apart from Calzy 3, the winning apps included Florence, an interactive storytelling app, designed by an Australian developer; Adequate, a smart note-taking app by a Dutch developer; iTranslate Converse, an app that turns your iPhone and Apple Watch into a two-way interactive device that can translate conversations into 38 languages, by an Austrian developer; Bandimal, a child-friendly music composition app, by a Finnish developer; and Frost, a free-form puzzle game by an Austrian developer.
“This year’s winning apps and the developers behind them have created some really innovative and inspiring apps,” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “The Apple Design Awards have been a launchpad for developers who’ve made beloved apps on the App Store, like Procreate, Zova, djay Pro and Monument Valley, and we know these winners will continue that tradition.”