Welcome one and all to the SwiftUI Jam Awards. For those of you joining us who might not be familiar with what
SwiftUI Jam is, it is a 54-hour code-a-thon that we ran for our community February 19th-21st. It was an incredible
journey watching our participants bring their ideas to light over such a small period of time. Our timeline was
filled throughout the weekend with pictures, gifs and videos of incredible progress made by so many teams. You can
still see a lot of it today by searching #swiftuijam on Twitter.
We are so grateful for the vibrant community of participants that came together and set aside a weekend to jam with
us.
We could go on and on with the praise we have for our community but what you are really here for today are the
awards. As you may already know, we encouraged all our participants to open source their work in order to be
considered for awards. While we see this event as completely non-competitive we wanted to find a way to still
encourage open sourcing work and diversity of submissions.
SwiftUI Jam participation and award stickers
👍 Submissions/Non-submissions
Speaking of encouragement, we just wanted to acknowledge that whether or not you submitted your work at the end of
this jam, that you did a great job. Finishing a code jam is really hard and takes practice. It is an art in and of
itself. A code jam is also a great place to make mistakes, try wild ideas, practice your team collaboration and
scoping skills. A code jam is as much about the journey as the destination. So we hope you take us seriously when we
say that you are all winners for participating in this event.
🧑⚖️ Judgement considerations
Before we get to the awards we wanted to make a few things clear that helped guide our decision making when picking
an award winner got tough. First, we awarded a maximum of 1 award per team. Some apps may have been nominees for
multiple categories but we tried to pick one where they were strongest. Secondly, when in doubt, we favored
submission completeness. If two apps were strong in one category but one was more end-to-end complete we gave it the
benefit.
🏆 Awards
Little Code, Big Impact - Shimmer by Josh Homann
Our first award honors a contribution that is not all about code quantity. Shimmer is a Swift Package for
adding
a shimmer effect to redacted SwiftUI Views to make loading skeletons. If you look at the code that makes this
happen, the main file is less than 100 lines. Nonetheless it delivers something incredibly useful that is a very
common request from design teams these days. Josh has done an incredible good job of laying out examples and
even
documenting the works in a blog entry. Outstanding work, Josh. We hope we’ll see Shimmer listed on the Swift
Package Index soon.
Awesome Animations Award - Quiz Me Up! by Andy & Vinnie
Our jam had a lot of great submissions with slick animations but we were particularly floored by the look and
feel of every part of Quiz Me Up! No transition went without receiving love from the team and it filled a simple
quiz app full of energy. Definitely check this one out.
Our Game Award was another category full of cool submissions which made this tough. ShiftUI did a great job of
playing with neumorphic design elements and implementing a classic puzzle game mechanism. The swipe interactions
on this game felt really good and we were particularly impressed that you could shift entire rows and columns at
the same time.
Our deep docs award was a tricky one to award specifically from a code documentation perspective because we
realized that clean well documented code and codeathons are not necessarily a great match for one another.
However, we felt that the Praxxis Labs team embodied the concept of documentation in everything they did. The
app itself is a concept for an interactive tool that teaches swiftui. It contains many simple swiftui apps that
each can be inspected on a view for view basis to see the underlying code. In addition to this the team also did
an audio blog every day documenting their journey.
We were really impressed with the iRetro’s throwback to an older era of that tiny brick in your pocket that
could hold every song you ever owned. Not only does it look cool, it functions too. You can install this app on
your phone and immediately start playing music from your Apple Music library. The touch dial is functional, they
implemented both a light and dark themed version of the iPod, they even added haptics and sound effects too,
which gives the experience a very wholesome feel. You can even be already listening to the Music app, open
iRetro and see it in the ‘Now Playing’ section.
The Quiz Jam app is a nice little flash card application, complete with Tinder-like swipe interactions, card
flips and a score meter. You can add your own flash cards in the manage section which makes good use of the edit
functionalities available in SwiftUI. Not only did the team deliver a thorough and complete app, they also wrote
a great blog post about the app, how it functions and what SwiftUI gotchas they learned along the way. The
members of this team worked across 4 different time zones and at varying skill levels, yet managed to deliver a
100% complete concept - no partial features delivered. This is a testament to their planning and collaboration
skills which they discuss a bit in the blog as well. We liked that this blog not only tackled what they learned
while coding, but how they planned to execute effectively in a short period of time.
Widgets were another category with many good submissions. What we liked most about Unit Quest was that it was
both an iOS app and a widget that functioned well together. The basic concept of the app is to gamify your todo
list by assigning tasks to RPG units that level up over time as you get stuff done. For every unit you can add a
separate widget for tracking their progress. We also liked that when you tapped the widget it took you to the
relevant unit’s detail page, demonstrating some nice cross-communication between the widgets and the app.
We threw the comedian award to team Moonshot for their simple, yet effective and amusing sound board watch app.
Noise Time is a soundboard of goofy sound clips from the TV show Adventure Time. If you’re looking for a goofy
app for your watch that plays Adventure Time sound clips, or maybe you wanted to repurpose it to play your own
set of sounds, check this app out.
Whensday is an todo list application complete with date management and priority flagging capabilities. What we
really liked about this app was how different it looked on iOS versus MacOS. A lot of attention was paid to
making each interface fit the platform well. We think this is a great codebase to look into for inspiration on
how you might want to set up an app to hit both platforms.
While we didn’t list this award on the website, it occurred to us that it was one worth recognizing. We had a
couple of submissions that were developed into Swift Packages. Both Shimmer, the winner of our Little Code, Big
Impact Award and Waveform by Doug. Waveform is an impressive library for displaying audio wave forms, including
pinch and zoom capabilities and segment selection. There is an impressive number of capabilities for audio
waveform interaction in this application.
We want to commend this team because while the jam submission wasn't quite complete, they continued to work on
their project in a separate branch and it is definitely worth checking out the latest code. The Specto app is
quite impressive; It allows you to record audio messages, while simulating the waveform being copied on to a
vinyl disc and maintained in a collection. It also automatically names your recording by transcribing the audio.
There’s still so much we haven’t had the chance to talk about today, so we encourage you to head over to the
SwiftUI Jam gallery and see all the submissions in their glory. For team captains who want to further edit their
information, submission editing is now available again. We’ve also added a new data column to allow you to provide a
link to the latest code, should you be interested in showcasing your most up to date work and not just what was
completed by the end of the jam.
