Swift Community Awards – Hacking with Swift

Celebrating our amazing community

After almost 1000 nominations and 5000 votes, it's time to announce the winners of the 2019 Swift Community Awards, chosen by you! Each category has one winner and one or more highly commended entries.

BEST NEWSLETTER

Getting news and tutorials in your inbox is often the easiest way to learn, but which email newsletter has been most useful to you?

Shortlisted: Indie iOS Focus Weekly, iOS Dev Weekly, iOS Goodies, Swift by Sundell, Swift Developments, Swift Weekly Brief, and SwiftLee.

Highly commended: Swift Developments and iOS Goodies.

Winner: iOS Dev Weekly. With its continuing blend of insight, community spirit, and entertainment, iOS Dev Weekly continues to be a firm favorite in our community.

BEST CONFERENCE

Apart from WWDC, which conference was most interesting, insightful, or beneficial for your career?

Shortlisted: AltConf (US), iOSDevUK (UK), iOSConf SG (Singapore), Mobiconf (Poland), NSBrazil (Brazil), NSSpain (Spain), Server-side Swift (Denmark), Swift Aveiro (Portugal), Swift Island (The Netherlands), try! Swift (Worldwide), and UIKonf (Germany).

Highly commended: try! Swift and NSBrazil.

Winner: Swift Island. As one of the new breed of mentor-driven camp events, Swift Island has built itself a reputation for fun, friendship, and lots of hands-on coding.

BEST PODCAST

Whether it makes you laugh, makes you think, or makes you refactor your code, which Swift podcast do you think leads the field?

Shortlisted: Contravariance, Fireside Swift, iOS Dev Discussions, Stacktrace, Swift by Sundell, Swift Unwrapped, Under the Radar, and Waiting for Review.

Highly commended: Fireside Swift and Under the Radar.

Winner: Swift by Sundell. This was the closest category of all, but John's continuing interest in exploring new parts of our language helped win the day.

BEST DESIGN TOOL

Getting your user interface right is never easy, but the right tools can make all the difference. Which design resource do you think deserves special praise?

Shortlisted: Adobe XD, Affinity Designer, Drama, Figma, Flawless App, Monodraw, PaintCode, Sketch, and Zeplin.

Highly commended: Figma.

Winner: Sketch. Although its lead is smaller than last year, Sketch continues to have a hard-core base of fans who rely on it every day.

BEST THIRD-PARTY SERVICE

Wrestling with iTunes Connect, handling continuous integration, getting user feedback, and more – these tools help developers do more with less.

Shortlisted: Appfigures, App Center, Bitrise, CircleCI, Firebase, Instabug, MacStadium, Sentry, and Vapor Cloud.

Highly commended: Bitrise.

Winner: Firebase. Google's one-stop shop for hosting, databases, ML, and more makes it easy to use no matter what scale you're working at.

BEST DEVELOPER TOOL

Which one tool has done the most to make your app development life better?

Shortlisted: AppCode, Atom, Charles Proxy, Flawless App, Fork, iXGuard, Reveal, Tower, and Woodpecker.

Highly commended: Charles Proxy.

Winner: Fork. It might have started as a hobby project to build a Git client for macOS, but Fork is clearly winning fans across the community.

BEST OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT

There are lots of open-source Swift frameworks on GitHub, but which one stood out above the rest?

Shortlisted: Alamofire, AudioKit, CocoaLumberjack, ProgressHUD, PromiseKit, RxSwift, and Vapor.

Highly commended: RxSwift.

Winner: Alamofire. These two tied this category back in 2017, but with Combine eating away at some of Rx's user base Alamofire romped home with a strong lead.

MOST INSPIRING INDIE APP

Which indie app do you think did the most to show off what native app development is capable of?

Shortlisted: Capsicum, CocoaHub, Dark Noise, Dice by PCalc, Flighty, and Penbook.

Highly commended: Dark Noise and Flighty.

Winner: CocoaHub. This app hasn't even left TestFlight yet, but is already proving popular as a way to track news from all around the Swift community.

MOST INSPIRING PRESENTATION

Over the last year, which talk at a conference has done the most to inspire you in your work?

Shortlisted: Glenna Buford: Rolling your own Network Stack, Kate Castellano: How to raise a template, Berta Devant: Help your users trust you, Michael Ilseman: The Philosopher's String, Mayuko Inoue: Pay it Forward by Being You, Soroush Khanlou: From Problem to Solution, Carola Nitz: Learnings from 6 years working on VLC for iOS, Vincent Pradeilles: The underestimated power of KeyPaths, Ben Scheirman: Asynchronous Swift, Ishmael Shabazz: App Subscriptions - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Daniel Steinberg: Swift 5’s brand new Result Type, Daniel Steinberg: Understanding Combine, Kaya Thomas: Inclusive and Accessible App Development, James Thomson: An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs, Agnes Vasarhelyi: Behind the Scenes with Auto Layout, and Brandon Williams, Protocol Witnesses.

Highly commended: Daniel Steinberg: Understanding Combine, and James Thomson: An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs.

Winner: Mayuko Inoue: Pay it Forward by Being You. This powerful talk was delivered at AltConf 2019, and encouraged everyone to invite voices into our community and build it into something bigger and better – a well-deserved winner.

RISING STAR

Which new Swift resource (website, YouTube channel, podcast, etc) do you think has had the biggest impact on our community?

Shortlisted: Donny Wals, Joseph Heck / Using Combine, Julian Schiavo, Oh my Swift, Swift with Majid, and The SwiftUI Lab.

Highly commended: The SwiftUI Lab.

Winner: Donny Wals. Although Donny had blogged a little previously, he restarted in earnest this year and has already written some great tutorials. Right now he's posting an article a day for all of December – why not check them out?