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WWDC 2016: Platforms State of the Union

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The second half of WWDC Day One is a different sort of keynote. Not as glitzy or glamorous as the one with the Apple SVPs you know, and almost definitely not as well rehearsed and exciting for the general public. But for developers, this is the where they find out how much work they’re going to have to do to take advantage of all the new technologies and features that Tim, Craig and team talked about.

Here’s a recap.

Extensions

So much of what’s new in iOS 10 revolves around the revamped extensions system. You’ll see this phrase crop up again and again in areas such as Sharing, Calls, Spotlight, Photos, Siri, Documents, Notifications, Maps, Widgets, Keyboards and iMessage.

iMessage

These sit in place of the keyboard after you invoke them, and you can interact with the app they represent or use their content in an iMessage. A huge opportunity to change the way people communicate here. You could say that Facebook Messenger has done this already, but for me the Apple method is better due to the fact that there’s already a huge ecosystem of apps that can add these extensions quite easily.

SiriKit

Leverage the power of Siri easily through your app. Limited to 6 domains to start off with: Messaging, VoIP calling, Payments, Ride booking, Photo search, Workouts. They’re the areas with the most use, but I think others will follow over time.

Swift 3

Apple’s great new programming language that is taking the world by storm. It’s now Open Source and being used across many different platforms. This third revision sees much simplification and streamlining, at the expense of breaking code written in previous versions. Xcode 8 has a tool to automatically upgrade your code, if you’d like, or you can carry on using Swift 2.3 which is still included.

Swift Playgrounds

Learn to program the easy way. These interactive programming tutorials are the sort of thing I wish I had age 12. The best news about this is that the playgrounds can be shared with Xcode on a Mac, and Apple is releasing theirs under a reuse licence so people can create more tutorials in the same style. It has a really great interface that is capable of so much without the need to actually type anything. So cool.

It’s similar to third-party app Codea, but as Playgrounds is made by Apple it’s so much better. I do hope that—eventually—apps can be created or published from Playgrounds.

Xcode

The app you use to build apps. It’s a monster of an app, with a steep earning curve and a penchant to changing its user interface every year around this time.

This year the documentation team have been hard at work combining and reducing the documentation package which is now apparently a tenth of the previous size. Xcode itself gets Extensions allowing developers to hook onto it in an approved way to supplement its features with tricks and tools of their own. Yes, the Xcode interface changes yet again but for definite good, allowing you to layout an app in an almost WYSIWYG way.

More, better debugging tools some of which happen at runtime meaning you can save time not having to run your code to find your bugs.
Stalwart system Console.app also sees improved logging and live streaming during debug.

Provisioning finally sees much improvement. This is the process you have to go through to be entitled to run code on your device and also be able to upload it to iTunes Connect so it can be be sold on the App Store. I’ve banged my head against the problems this could cause many times, so this is a very welcome change.

Differential Privacy

Apple seems to be using this as a setup for some big changes in the future regarding Privacy. It will require a bunch more education for people to be comfortable with it. The mentions I’ve seen of it are a bit fluffy on where exactly this is being used, but I’d bet it’s everywhere in iOS in order to better learn from user behaviour and make better decisions. I’d hazard a guess that data has been collecting in a similar way since the beginning of iOS, but now it’s time to double down on it for certain iOS 10 features that would otherwise appear to compromise your privacy.

iOS

iOS is now most definitely grown up. This year sees so much built on the groundwork of the past several years. Software this complicated takes time to build, and even longer to build it well, so it’s very exciting to see the fruits of labour pay off with so many awesome new features coming to iOS 10.

watchOS

A whole bunch of popular frameworks such as SpriteKit, SceneKit and CloudKit come to the watchOS to enable better apps. Let’s not forget the much talked about speed improvements. Fingers crossed.

tvOS

Similar to watchOS, tvOS is a relatively new branch of iOS and continues to receive a bunch new frameworks and technologies to bring it closer to iOS in capability.

Game controller changes, supporting up to 4 simultaneous controllers. Plus, developers can now mark their game as requiring a game controller. No longer do you have to find a way for the game to work on the Siri remote.

macOS

Better inegration with watchOS, including the ability to unlock your Mac by just being nearby. Window tabs for free in mukti-document apps. Picture in Picture for video playback. The same changes to Messages, Photos and Apple Music that we see on iOS.

LZFSE—Apple’s more efficient and less power-hungry compression library has gone Open Source.

Apple File System—a Next-Generation File System for Apple Products optimised for current and future technologies, replaces 18-year-old HFS that was built when we all carried around floppy disks.

WWDC 2016: thoughts on the keynote

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

June is the highlight of the year for any Apple fan, with WWDC being the focal point of all eyes on Apple. Having recently left Apple it was interesting to view the event as an outsider for the first time in a while, with no prior knowledge of anything that was announced.

This year I also had the company of a nice a cold drink in my hand as it’s a warm evening in London, UK, the day is winding down just as the conference is ramping up.

If you missed it you can watch a recording of the keynote at www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2016/

Fast and fun

For me that was a markedly better keynote than last year. More focussed, more features, more new faces. Some really great presenters appeared on stage—other than Craig Federighi, of course—I remember at least five that really made an impression. I hope that trend continues as the old guard make way for the new.

watchOS

This had to go first, in my mind, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the platform in need of the most change. And second, it’s the hardware the most users need convincing of. That said, if it heralds the performance increases that were demonstrated on stage it could finally be time the watch fulfils expectations.

The system software changes that bring these speedups will no doubt require apps to be updated to use the new APIs, or at least be changed to cope with the new view hierarchies. I am interested in how many of these improvements will come for free, from the perspective of an app developer and user.

It’s great to see the OS become simpler and more iPhone-like, much needed. This is for me the type of watchOS that the device should have shipped with: familiar, fluid and fast.

tvOS

A bit odd that Remote.app was mentioned as it’s been out for a while, but the changes it is receiving are quite substantial. Single Sign-On is a really nice time saving feature that acknowledges the inherent issues with TV and related input mechanisms, and helps things become easier. More frameworks arrive from iOS, all very welcome. APIs and features to make the Cable companies happy. Lots of changes, too many to mention here. Feels like a catch-up update to me.

macOS

Name change! But for those of us who have been around the block a few times, everything old is new again as we return to a variation of the classic Mac OS name that saw us through the 1990s.

Universal Clipboard, for me as a heavy user of a clipboard management app (Alfred) is a real killer feature that only the OS can provide at the level of integration it needs to be done. I thought the demo of this was great. Craig was excellent once again. Apple Pay in Safari, huge news that didn’t raise many eyebrows. A tool to help people free up space on their Mac, I suspect a reaction to the glut of mediocre apps that proclaim to do similar tasks filling up the Mac App Store charts.

Tabs everywhere—done at an OS-level so multi-window apps get the feature for free—my hunch is that this, along with PiP, is the start of a push to get more users using full screen mode. But why might that be? Hmm.

Siri! Very impressive demos. Let’s see if I’m ready to talk to my machine.

iOS

Less than half way into the keynote and we are already at iOS. This reaffirmed the sheer amount of new stuff in iOS—let’s not forget that it’s the most important platform by far for Apple.

The new lock screen and associated integration looks exactly what it should have been all along. Sliding to the right to get to Camera might take a bit of getting used to, but I appreciate the issue that TouchID now being so fast that something had to change with the lock screen UI.

Developers now get API hooks into more of iOS, which can only be a good thing to herald in new types of apps. I’m excited to see what might come of an API that can search through the objects found in photos.

Apple Music—what a demo! I loved Boz’s style. Interesting new design language being used in Music and News, perhaps trying to adjust the target audience to a younger demographic? Certainly made both apps feel less stuffy to me. Big changes after only a year.

The demo of Messages was another favourite, despite the technical hiccups half way through. Cupertino looking firmly and squarely at Menlo Park. Integration with extensions mean stock apps like Maps and Messages stand a good chance at becoming real competition to Facebook’s Messenger and Snapchat apps.

Swift Playgrounds for iPad for me is a real killer app. It will sell iPads into schools at an astonishing rate. Another great demo, too. I hope the programmers keyboard can be used outside of the app, as some of the features like swiping to quickly get numbers and punctuation are lifted straight out of the popular TouchPal keyboard, which I currently use. Though of course I’d rather use a stock keyboard if at all possible.

All-in-all some amazing integration of apps into pretty much every asect of iOS from Maps through Photos to Messages. Users should be ecstatic.

More…

Other things I spotted that weren’t called out in the keynote but that I’ll be looking into over the course of the week:

Apple File System—a Next-Generation File System for Apple Products, replaces HFS and optimised for current and future technologies.
Removal of stock apps—more control for the user, and more frequent updates from Apple.
Safari Extensions on the Mac App Store—very cool new avenue for developers to make money.
I’m sure more new features will come to light this week.

Teaser websites

WWDC 2008 Keynote on Nintendo Wii

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I watched updates from the 2008 WWDC Keynote through my Nintendo Wii!

And why not?