Issue 355

Comment

What a fantastic WWDC! This is my first time in San Jose so it's been really interesting to see how different things are here compared to San Francisco. From my perspective, I love it! The show and all the surrounding activities fit so much better here and I feel like I've run into many more people just because the scale of everything is a little smaller. Oh and the scooters are 💯💯💯!

Talking of running into people, thank you so much if you came up and talked with me this week! If you're still here I'll be around all day today so please do feel free to stop me if you see me. Also, be careful or I'll sneak into your photos! 😂

So, on to the announcements. I've spoken to several people who expressed disappointment about the lack of a "wow" feature on stage (although I'd say Siri Shortcuts pretty much counted as wow for me), but I really don't see it that way. What we did get was a whole load of smaller features and refinements and nothing that should distract us too far from spending the next 12 months building amazing apps.

I won't name specific technologies, but think back to previous years where a huge new "wow" feature or a new type of app was introduced. We then spend the next 3-9 months furiously implementing them, only to find out that it didn't really bring any more success or revenue in the long run. I feel like this year Apple is saying "You've got great tools and APIs to make apps, we'll concentrate on making the core operating system better, you go do the same for your apps". I like that, and you'll be grateful of it when the new, paradigm shifting, Metal rendered, holographic UI framework requires us to re-implement everything next year. 😂

Of course, I also want to talk about Marzipan but before I do I want to give a little advice to Apple. If you don’t give UIKit on macOS a name, quickly it’s going to get called Marzipan for the rest of time. It may already be too late! 😀

I've seen some confusion around Craig's use of the big NO slide that iOS and macOS are not merging, and then previewing UIKit apps running on macOS. To me, this makes perfect sense and it's how I always hoped it would be done. Let's bring some of the tools and techniques to macOS that we've been enjoying on iOS. This is UIKit, but it's not iOS. I'm also glad to see enhancements to AppKit at the same time. This is not (yet?) a replacement, but a compliment. I like it. It's also a really great sign that this is being used internally.

Wrapping up, I can't skip the improvements to Xcode. Again, there's nothing revolutionary here but there are some great smaller changes and the source control change bar is especially impressive.

I also can't finish this without raising a glass to "Bug fixes and other improvements" which will no longer pass for release notes unless that is only what the release contained. This'll cause problems for some (larger) companies, but will be better for users. Here's to you, useless release notes! 🍷

But Dave, what about all the other stuff from this week? What about the new App Store Guidelines, the Swift 5 delay, ARKit 2.0 or the oodles of ML related announcements and improvements, or the fact that iTunes Connect is being rebranded to App Store Connect and now has an official API and TestFlight invite links! 😱 Yes, there's a lot I didn't talk about up here and you won't find coverage of these things down below either. However, we have 3 months to cover everything important before the official releases. There's still time... 👍

What a week, I love this event and this community.

Tools

Enabling newly added opt-in features in Xcode 10

Some of the new features in Xcode 10 are off by default. Make sure you don't miss any of the new goodies by reading this by Antoine van der Lee.

Code

API Diffs

Looking for the lowdown on everything that has changed? Look no further than the official docs for a comprehensive list of changes, by framework and class. Or, if you'd prefer a full list of only what has changed then there's also this list generated by objc-diff.

What’s new in iOS 12?

This is a great round up of the headline features of iOS 12 from Paul Hudson. Covering CreateML, grouped notifications, Siri Shortcuts and the fact that UIWebView is finally being deprecated this is a good way to get yourself up to speed with an overview of the API changes.

What’s new in Swift 4.2

Ole Begemann with his regular look at what's new in Swift. There's a playground to download to demonstrate all of the changes. Download Xcode 10 and get started.

A first look at the Natural Language framework

One of the new frameworks that didn't get a huge amount of coverage this week was the Natural Language framework. John Sundell has a quick write up for us here. This looks very cool.

Custom Intents with SiriKit on iOS 12

Let it be known in the future that it was Ben Dodson who first called it "Siri the all-seeing widget assistant". 😂 You did learn all about NSUserActivity when it first appeared in iOS 8, right? If not, I see some of that in your future. Seriously though, I love this feature of iOS 12.

Design

Apple Books UI Design

Tiem is right, this is an absolutely beautiful cross between a skeuomorphic style and flat design.

Business and Marketing

Ersatz Free Trials

So, free trials are now officially a thing for non-subscription apps. Of course there are no API changes (they were not needed), this is purely a clarification in the review guidelines which had a major update this week. Daniel Jalkut goes through the details and why he would prefer something different. I'm personally really surprised to see any of this announced and I'm certainly not expecting any further changes.

Coming later this year

I'm still really curious to see what the full story is here with Panic and Bare Bones coming back to the App Store with BBEdit and Transmit. This tweet is as good as we have right now though. There's more to come here, I'm sure. These announcements, along with the redesign (and native rebuild) of the MAS is great news for the Mac.

Videos

What's New in tvOS 12

I feel like this session needs a special call out. There wasn't a huge deal made out of the new tvOS during the keynote or the State of the Union, but there are some huge changes to tvOS coming in this release. TVUIKit is new and incredibly flexible. I wanted to highlight this as you may have already moved on from thinking about Apple TV apps, but this is worth a second look.

And finally...

Coming soon to GitHub...

📎

Issue 355 June 8th 2018