Tag: wwdc

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trivia

WWDC 2022

For those who are not “in the loop,” WWDC is Apple’s developer conference, where they announce all the new software releases for the year. Usually the new updates are made available in September and October, but we get a preview of what’s coming in June.

So, what happened this year?

I don’t think there’s anything earth-shattering for Wandle Software. The improvement to SwiftUI should be beneficial, as should the enhancements to Catalyst. App Intents should make the Shortcuts that were included in Yummy 3.6 a little bit more useful.

I’m going to take a look at the new home screen widgets for iPhone, but I’m not convinced that this is the right place for Quick Calendar. You’ll also be disappointed that Apple did not allow widgets to be interactive, so the long wished-for ability to move back and forth between months is still not possible. Maybe next year.

My favourite new feature, PassKeys, is the beginning of the end for passwords, but there’s no immediate application of it in any of our apps.

All good stuff. We’ll continue to support the latest operating systems of course.

As a consumer, I’m most excited about the watchOS updates. The improvements to the Workout app look great. But — and this is important — I have not installed any of the new operating systems on my devices.

Please don’t install the betas on any of your devices!

I have not tested our apps on the new operating systems yet, and, even if I had, there has not been enough time to resolve any issues. Be patient.

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trivia

WWDC21

WWDC is always a cool, exciting, busy, scary week for anyone developing apps for the Apple eco-system. Will your app get Sherlocked1? Will there be new APIs that completely change how your apps work? Are there exciting new opportunities? Long story short, if you Apple developer friends look stressed over the summer, the things announced at WWDC are likely the reason.

This year’s WWDC was great. The move from in-person to remote has been fairly seemless from an outsiders perspective, though I’m sure it didn’t feel that way to the organisers. My favourite feature is that the videos can be just the right length rather than having to be stretched to fill fourty minutes.

The keynotes were not the highlight. Unusually for Apple, there wasn’t much of a story connecting the announcements, just a list of features. Which is not to say that the features were bad. The improvements to FaceTime alone look like they’re worth the price of entry. Focus should be good — I use “Do Not Disturb” a lot — and the streamlining of notifications feels overdue.

From a developer perspective, I have not seen anything that dramatically change Wandle Software’s plans. I’ll start building our apps in the new developer kit sooner rather than later but at this time I don’t see any glitzy new features enabled by the update2.

If this all sounds negative or that I’m underwhelmed, that is not the case. iOS 15 appears to be a large number of very nice, relatively small improvements. There’s no one, big thing to get super excited about but, in the grand scheme, these quality-of-life updates often have a greater effect. From what I’ve seen, it’s quite stable, especially for a first beta, which bodes well for September or October when it will get a wider release.

  1. Will Apple incorporate all your functionality in the operating system itself. ↩︎
  2. Frustratingly, there are some good tools that I’d like to use but that will have to wait until I can stop supporting iOS 14. ↩︎
Categories
trivia

WWDC 2020

There’s a lot to take in. As ever, the keynote is a bit of a firehose and knowing where to start is a challenge. What looks cool? Will it work on my hardware? How will it affect Wandle Software’s apps? Ultimately, none of these questions will be answered in this post. This is just some quick thoughts and speculation and is, by no means, a commitment!

At a high level, things look pretty good. iOS and iPadOS don’t look super ambitious so, hopefully, they’ll be more stable than iOS 13 was las year. Sadly, that’s not a high bar to clear. There’s still some nice stuff. As I user, I think I’ll appreciate the new Siri interface and the on-device speech recognition. It’ll be fascinating to see how Translate works. The more desktop-class apps, like Music, on the iPad look great.

Looking at it from the point of view of someone with an existing Mac, Big Sur looks… fine. I’m not sure that more Catalyst apps is a good idea; last years just were not terribly good. The updated UI… again, I don’t have a strong visceral reaction one way or the other. I don’t think it would have been my first choice of new feature however.

Looking forward, it is, of course, the move to “Apple Silicon” CPUs in the Mac that is the big news. This has been rumoured so long that it felt like almost a relief when they announced it. As with previous transitions, they seem to have planned it well.

As a developer, I’m ambivalent about it. As long as the tools are available — and I suspect they will be — I’m not sure it matters what the underlying CPUs architecture is. If I write Scala or Swift or Ruby, the tools all do the conversion for me. If anything, as I quipped on Twitter, having ARM Macs will make my Raspberry Pi more useful as the number of suitable Docker images will vastly increase.

What about Wandle’s apps? It’s really too early to say. Widgets on both Mac, iOS and iPadOS look dramatically different so I suspect Quick Calendar will need some work. Yummy’s recently added Popular Links widget might also need a refresh.

Overall, cautiously positive about WWDC this year.

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news

WWDC 2018

What do the announcements at this years Apple Developer Conference mean for Wandle Software’s apps? In addition to a few more general thoughts, that’s what I hope to answer with this post.

But first, what was I hoping from Apple and what did we actually get? I didn’t put up a wish-list for WWDC this year mostly because my desires matched up mostly with the rumours, which was that this was going to be a “stability” update.

High Sierra has been a low point for Mac releases in my opinion, with the installer on both of our Macs failing (mine on the initial install, a point release for my wife). You might forgive the installer if the update had huge user-facing benefits but, as neat as ADFS is, there’s not much to see upgrading from Sierra. iOS 11 also had problems, but more like glitches than absolute failures. I’m not adding anything new here to the “stability” debate, I’m just saying that I see the same problems.

The rumours were not untrue. The first thing Apple talked about was performance. I guess for marketing reasons it’s difficult to come out and say “we’re fixing lots of bugs” so talking about speed improvements was probably smart. But the surprising thing was the number of other nice, new additions. There was not a single must have feature, but put together all the changes to both iOS and macOS look like they’ll be well worth having.

As a consumer, there are a bunch of nice things that I’m looking forward to. The most glitzy is possibly being able to have up to 32 people in a FaceTime call. (Yeah, it’s a big number, but anyone who has used Zoom or Bluejeans will know that it’s possible if not a great experience.) And the other stuff like being able to use your iPhone camera from your Mac is going to simplify a number of more convoluted workflows. On a day-to-day basis, the enhancements to notifications is likely to be the feature that helps us the most.

The stand-out feature as a developer has to be Siri Shortcuts. If you recall from the keynote, they’re a combination of commands that you can, for want of a better word, train Siri to understand mixed with some simple scripting (using an app that isn’t currently available outside Cupertino). Unfortunately, right now, playing with the iOS 12 beta, there’s really not very much you can do with them as no apps support them yet!

Overall, the announcements made don’t have a huge impact on Wandle’s apps. I’m looking into Siri Shortcuts to see if they can add any value and, obviously, I’m testing on the iOS 12 to make sure that everything still works as intended.

Categories
trivia

WWDC 2015

As always, WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, is a bit of a firehose even when you’re sitting at home just reading the blogs and watching the occasional session video. I’m not sure how people in San Francisco actually keep up!

What I’m trying to say is that this post is far from complete. I’m sure that I’ve missed something important. But here is my top four things that I’ve taken away so far.

Bitcode

I list this one first because this is the one I’m most concerned about. The gist is that instead of compiling apps down to ARM and ARM64 code and sending that to Apple for review and release, we send a “partially compiled” app to Apple. When a user downloads it, Apple’s servers finish the job, compiling this intermediate code down to the specific hardware that they have.

Clearly this is Apple’s way of saying that new hardware is on the way — also see App Thinning — and they don’t want us to have to recompile our apps before they’ll work on it.

Why is that bad? Well, I have no idea what code will be executing on my users machines. What optimiser settings are Apple using? What compiler are they using? Are there any bugs in it?

Or put another way, Apple put an invisible step between the developer and the user. If it works, users get an optimised app. If it doesn’t, the developer gets a bunch of one star reviews for something that they had no ability to test. It doesn’t seem to me that the upside outweighs the risks.

Let’s hope they do it well and cautiously. Or that the new hardware is worth the hassle!

iPad multitasking

This one is going to sell a lot of iPad Air 2’s to developers in the next couple of months. I love this both as a developer and as a user.

As a user, being able to run two apps side by side suddenly makes the iPad far more useful. Can I say, finally?

And as a developer, it’s not even terribly hard to implement as long as the app is relatively new. With the caveat that more testing is needed, I got Yummy up and running in the Simulator without changing any code.

SLSafariViewController

It’s basically a “Safari view controller” that developers can use to show web content in their apps.

I thought that this would be ideal for Yummy. The value of the browser in Yummy is diminished by its lack of autofill (of password, addresses, credit card details, etc.) and log in details. SLSafariViewController, which suffers from none of those disadvantages, sounds like the solution.

However, in the first beta at least it’s limited in two important ways that means it won’t work in this scenario. Firstly, it’s modal. Secondly you can’t edit the URL. I’ve raised bug reports about both. We’ll see.

Still, I can see uses for it in its current form.

Spotlight searching inside apps

This is another good one, both for users and developers. Using Spotlight search — which has had lots of other nice improvements too — it will be possible to find things inside apps.

For example I was able to use Spotlight to find bookmarks that had been indexed by Yummy. This is more work that the multitasking but is not super hard.

In summary…

Yeah, I didn’t mention Swift or the Apple Watch. I think both have a great future but I don’t have any immediate applications for either right now. (For what it’s worth, my first app with Swift in it will probably ship before the end of the year.)

Like the multitasking, the Spotlight searches are going to create more reasons for more users to keep using compatible apps. But, more than that, it’s going to make apps considerably more useful without having to invest vast amounts of time to get the benefits.

This contrasts greatly with the last two releases of iOS. With 7, a huge amount of work was required just so that apps didn’t look out of place in the New World. For many apps, that work resulted in no new features or stability improvements. Version 8 required none of that, but it was a huge release for developers. Extensions were brilliant, but required a lot of work, especially since the development tools were flaky.

iOS 9 appears to be a stability release for Apple and the new features seem to give a lot of “bangs per buck” for developers. That’s my kind of release.