With less than week until nominations for the MDN Community Award 2009 close it’s a close race with so far 20 different people nominated for the award. I have listed the nominations so far (in alphabetical order), included a link to their site/blog and just one nomination reason/comment I have received for each.

Maybe you agree that someone on this list should win it, maybe you think it should be someone else. Make sure your voice is heard and submit your nomination. To take part simply send me an email at scotty at macdevelopernetwork dot com and tell me who you think should win it and why. The second part of that instruction is vital. Any nomination received that does not have an accompanying explanation will will be ignored and will not count towards the final result. You cannot vote for me (Scotty) as that would be pretty pointless if I had to present myself my own award so lets make sure that can’t happen. Any vote for me will not be counted nor will it be put in the NSConference draw. Don’t forget anyone who sends in a valid nomination for the MDN Community Award will be entered into a draw for a FREE place at either NSConference 2010 Europe or USA. (If you are already booked I will give you your ticket price back).

How Long Have You Got

In order to keep the award as close to 2009 as possible nominations will close at 23:59 PST on the 4th of January 2010.

The Nominations So Far

Mike Ash

Mike took on the task of answering developer questions on deep and interesting topic for the general good of the community. He has always contributed mightily to educating less experienced developers on mailing lists and IRC, but took his knowledge to the web in 2009 and went deep into new and old technologies. The whole series shows a depth of knowledge that’s presented in a way that’s easy to follow and understand. I’ve personally learned more about technologies in OS X (blocks, NSOperations, threading) than I knew before. Not only how to use, but how NOT to use and the pitfalls of using them.

Erik M. Buck and Donald A. Yacktman

I would like to nominate Erik M. Buck and Donald A. Yacktman for their book “Cocoa Design Patterns”. I believe that the book helps every Mac developer to better himself and understand the patterns that we see and hopefully use everyday, but never got a grip on. It makes out of every programmer, novice or experienced a better one. I believe it’s gonna be a reference book for years to come. It definitely helped me.

David Frampton

I would like to put my vote in for David Frampton, developer of the popular iPhone app Chopper. Great guy, super talented, and informative and entertaining tweets.

Matt Gallagher

My nomination is Matt Gallagher of the Cocoa with Love blog. There are perhaps more ‘visible’ options, but I think Matt’s blog is probably the best cocoa blog there is, and he probably doesn’t get the attention he deserves. Always excellent articles, and they go deeper than most.

Matt Gemmell

Therefore my nomination goes to Matt Gemmell for two reasons: the source code he makes available on his site and for his MDN segments which I consistently find to be the most useful parts of the show. He’s become the voice of reason in some ways, consistently providing sound advice and supportive and encouraging words to MDN Show listeners.

Danny Greg

I’m still getting to grips with Cocoa and the Cocoa Fusion podcast has been invaluable in presenting topics in small enough chunks that I can get grok them. His infectious enthusiasm for Cocoa rubs off and, as a bonus, he’s totally correct about 10.6.0 being below what I would expect from Apple. (Yes I know they rewrote lots under the hood and that it was a .0 – nevertheless, I expected better)

Joe Hewitt

for three reasons 1. His firebug plugin which is essential for any web or webkit work. 2. His Three 20 work (http://github.com/facebook/three20/) which is a unbelievable iphone framework. 3.His position on Apple & the app approval process for bringing it so much visibility.

Craig Hockenberry

I nominate CHOCKENBERRY (the uppercase version) for doing great software AND great App Store politics (ups – not a Mac related thing) …But yes, he deserves it!

Peter Hosey

My nomination is based on his work over at Stack Overflow where he is the all-time leader for answers with the Cocoa tag and second with answers on the Objective-C tag. That’s no small achievement considering that desktop mac development questions on that site don’t get as much traffic (and points) as iPhone questions, let alone Windows programming questions. It isn’t just his points total, though. His answers are detailed and thorough, not just banged out to be the fastest gun in the west. He is also generally patient with Help Vampires and tries to lead them to the answer rather than just hand out a solution.

Daniel Jalkut

I’d like to nominate Daniel Jalkut. The Core Intuition podcast he hosts with Manton Reece is packed with tons of quality tips and ideas for Mac developers, which is somewhat unusual outside of the the MDN multi-hour megashow. His community-encouraging blog posts are also often widely linked.
And last but definitely not least, this year he organized a fun software promotion didn’t just help users connect with developers, but showed how even competing developers could join together in a quick, informal promotion that benefitted everyone. He is vital in this community for years, promoting indie style of developer’s life, explaining whats and whys, so attracting new developers into this beatiful community.

Uli Kusterer

I would like to nominate Uli Kusterer. Uli is very helpful through the twitter, which is an inseparable part of the community at this time, by answering questions and posting tips. He also maintained a http://www.masters-of-the-void.com/ site which teaches C programming on Mac OS X. Although not specifically Cocoa site, it’s a good public resource for those who want to learn C before diving into Obj-C.

Jeff Lamarche

I think the developer with the most influential impact on the community is JEFF LAMARCHE http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/. During this year, he was a prolific author, both with his book on iPhone dev *and* his blog, where he wrote about one post a day, often with very rich and unique content, such as all these fantastic articles on OpenGL ES: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-table-of.html.

Martin Pilkington

I nominate Martin Pilkington for this award for his efforts on accessibility. Even though he didn’t meet his goal of having all his software products fully accessible by the end of the year, his presentation at NSConference 2009 got a lot of people thinking about this subject and that deserves to be honoured.

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch

I’d like to recommend Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch for the Mac Developer Network Community Award. Between putting on C4, providing great information through it tumblr, twitter, and blog, and providing so much open source code to the community, I think he is a perfect example of someone who unselfishly gives to the community.

Laurent Sansonetti

Now, who the h… is Laurent Sansonetti and why on earth should he be consiedered for a community award when many Cocoa programmers may not even have heard of him? Well, Sansonetti is the lead developer of MacRuby, which is an Apple open source (!) project aimed at making Ruby a first-class citizen of Cocoa….The reason I think this is important is that Ruby is used by tons of developers in the Rails community. And almost everybody in the Rails community, as I am sure you know, use Macs (all Macs come with both Ruby and Rails pre-installed). So, by making Cocoa accessible to Rails developers, I think this is going to bring loads of developers over from the vibrant Rails community to the (no less vibrant) Cocoa community.

Brent Simmons

I’d like to nominate Brent Simmons for the community award. The great thing about Brent is that he is always engaging and encouraging new members of the Mac and iPhone development community. Brent regular reaches out to bring people into the group and does a great job supporting their efforts. He also regularly shares from his deep pool of knowledge and experience at local developer gatherings, speaking at conferences and participation in podcasts. I’m not sure there is a another developer on the platform that shows such enthusiasm for what other independent developers are working on and celebrating their their accomplishments.

Dave Verwer

He’s (re)started NSManchester this year, which is an awesome user group and has had some great talks. Dave is also a -fantastic- chap, ever willing to share his knowledge as a mac developer (and anything else he knows about!) and is a real asset to the community.

Brandon Walkin

…In November 2008, Brandon released the first version of BWToolkit (http://www.brandonwalkin.com/bwtoolkit/), an indispensable Cocoa framework and accompanying Interface Builder plugin. BWToolkit has been making the lives of developers much easier over the past year as they can adopt cutting edge interfaces and user interaction that Apple often uses without having to construct them from scratch. Besides his popular framework, this up and coming designer/developer is often in #macdev on Freenode where he seems more than willing to offer help or suggestions. Increasingly he has been offering critiques of user interfaces (most often Apple’s) in which he points out what works, what doesn’t. He has an amazing eye for details and catches 1 pixel inconsistencies as regularly as Mat Gemmell’s Official Coffee Times…

Dan Wood

I vote for Dan Wood. He’s done a ton for the Indie Developer community both in terms of major open source code projects (e.g. iMedia Framework) and writing about the all important (and too often overlooked)  business development/marketing side of being an indie developer.

Marcus Zarra

I would like to nominate Marcus Zarra for the MDN Community Award for 2009. Despite being an incredibly busy & competent contract programmer, he’s put out a Core Data book this year and co-written a Core Animation book, both of which have been really well received. I’ve lost count of the number of conferences (locally, nationally and internationally) he’s spoken at (just this year) and freely shares his knowledge every Tuesday at NSCoder Night. He even makes the journey once a month to another city to participate in our CocoaHeads in Denver.

Small Print

The decision of MDN in any aspect concerning this award is final. The NSConference prize consists of only an NSConference entry ticket and does not include any allowance for travel to the event or accommodation at the event.