New Zealander Devin Davies's Crouton named top app in interaction category at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference

Tech giant Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference 2024 is on in a few days, and Devin Davies from Christchurch has packed his bags for a flight across the Pacific to Cupertino, California to join other coders on stage to pick up an award for the app he built.

Davis is one of two winners in the Interaction category in the Apple Design Awards for the app he developed, Crouton. To get the top spot in that category, apps are expected to demonstrate intuitive interfaces and effortless controls that are perfectly tailored to the their platform, as Apple puts it.

The Christchurch-based developer who works for software house Smudge was picked by Apple in competition with many other coders from around the world, large and small, who write some hugely popular games and apps.

Crouton, a recipe manager, is available for Apple's mobile and desktop operating systems on the company's app store. How did Davis come up with that idea?

"I was doing a lot of cooking and meal planning but just using the notes app on my phone, it got pretty out of hand so I decided to try and simplify things by making an app," Davis told interest.co.nz.

He used Apple's Xcode integrated development environment and framework to build the app using the Swift programming language. It took a while to reach the current stage of refinement and it wasn't always easy.

"Definitely some challenges, I launched in 2019 and have just been refining and trying to add useful features ever since," Davis said.

Priced at $29.99 Crouton is making a "healthy for a side project" amount of money. (Davis developed it outside Smudge). What advice does he have for others with ideas, looking to get them off the ground like Crouton?

"I think it's all about just getting started! Crouton has been such an iterative process, the first version was not pretty," Davis said.

"I think its also really helpful to build something that you'll personally use, that way there is motivation even if other people don't use it," he added.

When you get stuck and something's working right, and this happens to most developers, there is a pretty active indie iOS community on Twitter, and the Mastodon decentralised social media network that Davis finds very helpful. Does Davis have any other app ideas in the making?

"No plans for any new apps at this stage, still just focusing on making Crouton as useful as it can be for people in the kitchen 🙂," he said.

Here's what Apple's judges said about Crouton:

Recipe apps rise and fall on their organisation and information hierarchy, and Crouton serves up a clean, tasty interface for stashing away recipes, creating grocery lists, and presenting step-by-step instructions in the kitchen — even if you’re not exactly a chef. Everything in Crouton, from the next recipe step to the name of that missing spice, is easy to find and right where you need it. And its effortless series of interactions mean people can keep their focus on the counter rather than their screen.