SWIFT COMMUNITY AWARDS
After more than 700 nominations and 4500 votes, it's time to announce the winners of the 2017 Swift Community Awards, chosen by you!
Each category has one overall winner and one highly commended entry. All winners, highly commended entries, and shortlisted entries are entitled to use the appropriate winner, highly commended, or shortlisted Swift Community Awards logo on their website or other materials.
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: iOS Dev Weekly, iOS Goodies, Swift Developments, Swift Web Weekly, Swift Weekly, Swift Weekly Brief, This Week in Swift (Natasha the Robot).
Highly commended: This Week in Swift.
Winner: iOS Dev Weekly. This has been the pre-eminent newsletter in our community for as long as I can remember, and continues to be a fantastic and free resource we can all learn from.
Apart from WWDC, which conference was most interesting, insightful, or beneficial for your career?
Shortlisted: FrenchKit (France), iOSDevUK (UK), NSSpain (Spain), Playgrounds (Australia), #Pragma Conference (Italy), RWDevCon (US), Swift Alps (Switzerland), Swift Aveiro (Portugal), Swift Summit (US), try! Swift (Worldwide), UIKonf (Germany).
Highly commended: try! Swift.
Winner: NSSpain. This is a conference that punches way above its weight: fantastic speakers, enthusiastic audiences, and session videos that are both high quality and released quickly – what more could you want?
Whether it makes you laugh, makes you think, or makes you refactor your code, which Swift podcast do you think leads the field?
Shortlisted: Fatal Error, Fireside Swift, iPhreaks, Release Notes, SwiftCoders, Swift by Sundell, Swift Unwrapped, Under the Radar.
Highly commended: Swift by Sundell.
Winner: Swift Unwrapped. Jesse and JP's podcast goes into some serious technical depth, but does so in such a fun, relaxed way that you don't even notice you're learning.
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: Figma, Fluid, Glyphish, PaintCode, Sketch, The Noun Project, Zeplin
Highly commended: Zeplin.
Winner: Sketch. Gaining well over 50% of all votes, this is a product that combines non-destructive editing, code export, and smart collaboration to make something truly indispensible.
Wrestling with iTunes Connect, handling continuous integration, getting user feedback, and more – these tools help developers do more with less. Which one helped you the most?
Shortlisted: Bitrise, Buddybuild, Buildozer, CircleCI, Diawi, Fastlane, HockeyApp, Rollout.
Highly commended: Buddybuild.
Winner: Fastlane. Do you remember life before Fastlane? No, neither do we.
These are invaluable when you just want to focus on your code, but which one does the best job?
Shortlisted: Amazon Web Services, Bluemix (IBM Cloud), Firebase, Kinvey, Kumulos, PubNub, Realm.
Highly commended: Amazon Web Services.
Winner: Firebase. This brings together a whole suite of services into one smart, simple place, with a generous free plan that makes it convenient for anyone to try.
Which one tool has done the most to make your app development life better?
Shortlisted: AppCode, Bluepill, Charles Proxy, Flawless App, Jazzy, Reveal, Sourcery, SwiftLint.
Highly commended: Flawless App.
Winner: SwiftLint. This has quickly come to be the de facto standard way of ensuring your code is formatted perfectly, and is often the first thing that gets added to new Swift projects.
Which enterprise SDK has been most useful in your work?
Shortlisted: Buddybuild, Fabric, Google Analytics, Localytics, Nexmo, PayPal, SAP Cloud Platform.
Highly commended: Google Analytics.
Winner: Fabric. If there's a faster and easier way to handle crash reporting, track engagement, and monitor growth, we haven't heard of it.
Which project has done the most to help you deliver great Swift sites and APIs?
Shortlisted: Kitura, Kuery, Perfect, Stencil, SwiftyBeaver, Vapor.
Highly commended: Kitura.
Winner: Vapor. Currently in the middle of an upgrade for Swift 4, Vapor has been a run-away success that is truly putting server-side Swift on the map.
These tools help take the complexity out of Auto Layout, but everyone has their own favorite. The question is, which is yours?
Shortlisted: Anchorman, Anchors, Cartography, EasyPeasy, SnapKit, Stevia, PureLayout, TinyConstraints.
Highly commended: Cartography.
Winner: SnapKit. Although this project has only been around for three years, SnapKit has already achieved an incredible level of maturity and stability that make it the envy of many other projects.
There are lots of open-source Swift frameworks on GItHub, but which one stood out above the rest?
Note: This is the only category where the two winning entries recieved an identical number of votes, so there are two winners.
Shortlisted: Alamofire, AudioKit, Hydra, Imagine Engine, Lottie, MessageKit, Moya, RxSwift, Sourcery.
Highly commended: Sourcery.
Joint Winners: Alamofire and RxSwift. Alamofire is the undisputed way of doing advanced networking in Swift – it's smart, efficient, and incredibly simple to pick up. As for RxSwift, it's safe to say that 2017 was the year reactive programming came of age on iOS, and if this year is anything to go by then 2018 is likely to be the year of RxSwift.
Over the last year, which developer has done the most to help, educate, or inspire in our community?
Shortlisted: Andyy Hope, Ash Furrow, Daniel Steinberg, Erica Sadun, Felix Krause, John Sundell, Mike Ash, Natasha Murashev ("Natasha the Robot"), Sally Shepard, Sommer Panage.
Highly commended: John Sundell.
Winner: Natasha Murashev, aka Natasha the Robot. The fact that Natasha's work has already been highly commended twice in other categories tells you what a pillar she is in our community – she's seemingly tireless in her quest to pass on her excitement for Swift, and we're all lucky to have her.