Over the past week, Apple has held their World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) in San Jose. I’ve attended quite a few times over many years but in recent years I’ve enjoyed watching the live and recorded videos.
There was a time when it was easy to get a ticket, in fact, Apple really had to work to encourage developers to attend. These days there’s a lottery to get in, which is much better than the system they ran for a few years where we all sat re-loading a web page hoping to get to the booking form.
It’s not cheap for me to go in person, US$1,600 plus accomodation and travel from Australia adds up.
Because of the time zone difference, I have sometimes really struggled to stay awake sitting still in a dark room. I remember one year a friend attended but couldn’t sleep at night and so missed the morning sessions all week.
Being at WWDC in person is a wonderful experience. The buz in the room when big announcements are made, being among developers to discuss the implications of new technologies, meeting developers from well known organisations and learning a bit about the technical dept they carry.
The quality of presentations from Apple is the highest in the industry. Some things that stand out:
- The slides are minimal and clear
- Presenters speak well, walk back and forth, and hold up counting fingers
- Demonstrations almost always work (which is saying something on an alpha operating system) certainly compared to this.
Presentations from past events serve as the canonical introduction documentation for many years.
Apple does a good job to encourage random meetings. I’ve had interesting conversations while queuing and they make it easy to be seated at a lunch table with people you haven’t met.
Labs, where you get to ask questions of Apple engineers, are valuable. In the past I’ve gone with crazy ideas of how to overcome something and been convinced not to waste my time. In one case I demonstrated a bug and was encouraged to log it.
This year was very full of new things. Here's a terrific list from Patrick Balestra of Spotify. As others have noted, WWDC announcements are not just the result of a year of work but the culmination of projects which may have taken many years.
iOS/iPadOS 13 and macOS Catalina seem like good iterations. I think the splitting out of iPadOS isn’t a big deal this year but is a clue to a future diversion from the phone OS.
Privacy continues to be a differentiator for Apple and I think they’re on a winner. The sign in with Apple system, which generates a random email forwarder seems like a great idea but the fact that Apple mandates it in apps that offer sign in with Google or Facebook came across as heavy handed. While they can’t mandate it on the web, they’ll have to add it if people have signed up on an Apple device, so it will spread naturally.
Craig Federighi’s interview by Federico Viticci on the AppStories podcast was the clearest explanation I’ve heard of Apple’s strategy on the iPad in that they want to keep it easy to use for new users (even people who’ve never used a computer) and yet add deep functionality required by power users over time. It was great to hear Craig acknowledge that Apple reads what intense users such as Federico write about what they want from the platform.
The Accidental Tech Podcast was fun if only to hear the gang’s positive reaction to the MacPro announcement.
John Gruber’s Talk Show podcast also had Craig on this year but, while interesting, I felt that John was off his game and didn’t take the opportunity he was given to ask some hard questions. I know Apple has sometimes frozen out commentators who are critical but Gruber has a lot of ethical capital built up and could survive. It was charming to hear Craig acknowledge ATP’s John Siracusa.
Traditional media all had their rundowns of the announcements but really there’s not a lot for the general public until the OSs ship later this year.
SwiftUI looks good. A very small amount of easy to read code is matched with a graphical design tool - changes in either are reflected on the other immediately. I’m sure we’ll still be using UIKit and AppKit for a long time but I can see how this new approach could lead to some amazing optimisation of the UI code and I wonder how long it will be before someone makes a version for non-Apple platforms?
I’m still getting through the videos from this year and it’s also triggered some watching of older sessions.
My free app for ham radio users of Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR), WSPR Watch, gained dynamic type which means it honours the system setting that lets users crank up the size of type everywhere and my commercial macOS application Transcribe Helper is on the way to Touch Bar support. WWDC has stimulated me to tackle some of the existing technology Apple has already released.
I look forward to attending a future conference in a virtual reality space, the pieces are coming together.
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