Swift Community Awards – Hacking with Swift

Celebrating our amazing community

Each category has one winner and one or more highly commended entries. 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.

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.

Highly commended: iOS Goodies.

Winner: iOS Dev Weekly. Although it's facing increasing competition from the likes of iOS Goodies and Swift Developments, iOS Dev Weekly's laser focus on hot topics continues to be a central pillar in our community.

BEST CONFERENCE

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

Shortlisted: AltConf (US), dotSwift (France), FrenchKit (France), iOSDevUK (UK), NSSpain (Spain), Server-side Swift (Germany), Swift & Fika (Sweden), Swift Aveiro (Portugal), Swift by Northwest (US), Swift Island (The Netherlands), SwiftFest (US), try! Swift (Worldwide), UIKonf (Germany).

Highly commended: Swift Island.

Winner: try! Swift. This conference has always been big, but in the last year has gone up to previously unimagined heights with huge successes in Tokyo and New York – a worthy winner.

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, Inside iOS Dev, iPhreaks, Swift by Sundell, Swift Unwrapped, Under the Radar.

Highly commended: Fireside Swift.

Winner: Swift by Sundell. John has been working tirelessly to find and interview a wide variety of folks from our community, and each episode is guaranteed to teach you something new.

BEST DESIGN RESOURCE

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: Apply Pixels, Figma, Glyphish, PaintCode, Sketch, The Noun Project, Zeplin.

Highly commended: PaintCode.

Winner: Sketch. Not many third-party tools are "must have" in our community, but Sketch is as close as it comes – its design features are unparalleled, and it has a well-deserved legion of fans.

BEST DEPLOYMENT TOOL

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, Buildozer, CircleCI, Fastlane, GitLab Runner, Vapor Toolbox.

Highly commended: Bitrise.

Winner: Fastlane. Even as Apple opens up new APIs to do part of the work, Fastlane continues to be one central deployment tool we can mostly agree on – the fact that it's free and well-supported is just icing on the cake.

BEST BACKEND SERVICE

These are invaluable when you just want to focus on your code, but which one does the best job?

Shortlisted: Amazon Web Services, CloudKit, Firebase, IBM Cloud, Realm, Vapor Cloud.

Highly commended: Realm.

Winner: Firebase. Google's all-in-one platform continues to be a popular choice for storage, analytics, and more, plus its generous free allowance is more than enough for new developers to get started.

BEST DEVELOPER TOOL

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

Shortlisted: AppCode, Charles Proxy, Flawless App, Jazzy, Reveal, Sourcery, SwiftLint, Tower.

Highly commended: SwiftLint.

Winner: Charles Proxy. Previously the weapon of choice for network debugging through a Mac, Charles launched an iOS version at try! Swift Tokyo 2018 and is now pretty much the de facto standard.

BEST ENTERPRISE SDK

Which enterprise SDK has been most useful in your work?

Shortlisted: Cloudinary, Customerly, Fabric, Firebase, Google Analytics, Localytics.

Highly commended: Google Analytics.

Winner: Firebase. A second win for Google's SDK shows just how popular it is – with 1.5 million Firebase-powered apps out there it's clear Firebase is at the top of its game.

BEST SERVER-SIDE SWIFT PROJECT

Which project has done the most to help you deliver great Swift sites and APIs?

Shortlisted: Kitura, Leaf, Perfect, Stencil, SwiftNIO, Vapor.

Highly commended: SwiftNIO.

Winner: Vapor. Last year Vapor won this category, but this year it dominated the category, winning two-thirds of all votes. We can't imagine what 2019 has in store for server-side Swift, but it's fair to say that Vapor will be at the center of it.

BEST AUTO LAYOUT WRAPPER

These tools help take the complexity out of Auto Layout, but everyone has their own favorite. The question is, which is yours?

Shortlisted: Anchorage, Constrictor, PureLayout, SnapKit, Texture, TinyConstraints.

Highly commended: TinyConstraints.

Winner: SnapKit. When you're looking for a smart and easy to learn Auto Layout helper, SnapKit is increasingly the first port of call – and it just keeps getting better each year.

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, Carthage, CocoaPods, GitHawk, Moya, RNCryptor, RxSwift, Sourcery, SwiftLint, Turi Create, Vapor.

Highly commended: CocoaPods.

Winner: Vapor. This was the most hotly contested category, and the fact that Vapor came top shows just how big the server-side Swift movement is.

MOST INSPIRING PRESENTATION

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

Shortlisted: Adam Bell: Synthesizing Synths in Swift, Tobias Due Munk: Into the Deep, Kristina Fox: Embracing Change, Vincent Garrigues: Scaling iOS, Joachim Kurz: MVC Is Not Your Problem, Janina Kutyn: The Amazing Race, Ben Scheirman: Using Swift to Visualize Algorithms, Sam Soffes: Starting a Mobile Design System, Daniel Steinberg: Combinators, Daniel Steinberg: Stabilizing Your ABI, John Sundell: The Lost Art of System Design.

Highly commended: Kristina Fox: Embracing Change, and John Sundell: The Lost Art of System Design.

Winner: Joachim Kurz: MVC Is Not Your Problem. 2018 was the year of iOS architecture talks at conferences, but Joachim's stood out from the crowd by going into a great deal of technical depth and providing specific, hands-on solutions to common problems.