WWDC lottery registration opened on Monday and will be closing in the next few hours. For those of you who threw your hats in the ring, all that's left is to hope for $1600 to disappear from your bank accounts. 💸 Even if you don't end up with a ticket, look at the list of other events that week before deciding to rule out a visit. There are many great ways to spend the week of WWDC in San Jose without an official badge.
Scholarship applicants still have until Sunday to submit their playground and essay. Some developers have reported problems using Playgrounds in Xcode 8.3, so if you run into trouble, check out this Apple-approved workaround. If you don't get in this year, my advice as a three-time applicant, two-time rejectee would be to use the rejection to drive you to do even more over the next year. That said, I hope to have the chance to meet as many of you in June as possible. 🤞
It feels really weird not to be getting on a plane today! ✈️
As I previously mentioned I can't make it out to California this year for WWDC, so I'm going to be keeping up with the announcements from home instead. I am going to try for the authentic WWDC experience here though by charging myself $500 a night to sleep in my own bed, stocking my fridge with Odwalla and disconnecting my WiFi every hour or so. 🤣
If you're heading to San Jose for WWDC, AltConf, Layers, CocoaConf Next Door or any of the other events, I hope you have a wonderful time. Make sure to meet loads of new and interesting people (check out WWDC.family and WWDC.world to help with that) and learn everything you can about iOS 11 and all of the other goodies that we'll inevitably see for the first time.
If you're following along from elsewhere like me, then don't forget that the official WWDC app has already been updated for this year, or you could use the unofficial app if you prefer viewing on a Mac.
However you experience it, enjoy WWDC! Let's meet here next week to talk about what happened. Deal? 🤓
Along with this week’s operating system releases, Apple made some changes to the App Store Review Guidelines. There’s an official summary of the changes, but as always, the App Store Review Guidelines History site gives us what we’re truly looking for with a full diff. 🚀
The main changes focus on demo accounts, and it seems Apple is about to step up its testing of features gated behind an account login. The requirement for a demo account isn’t new, and I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on. I’m highlighting it to make sure as many people as possible see the changes before the spotlight shines on areas of your app that Apple might not have closely checked before.
If you have been sailing through review for years with a minimal demo account, it might be worth ensuring that the demo account has access to all your app’s features before your next release. I’d also encourage early submissions, especially if you have deadlines to hit. I’ll not be surprised to hear of a few questionable rejection stories in the next few weeks. 😬
The other thing I noticed in the diff was this wording:
Display advertising should be limited to your main app binary, and should not be included in extensions, App Clips, widgets, notifications, keyboards, watchOS apps, etc.
This wording isn’t new, it’s just moved, but I hope it’s the end of all the people jokes/hot takes about Dynamic Island advertising. I also hope Apple enforce it! 🤞
I’ve not talked about it in this newsletter yet, but for the last four months, Sven and I have been doing a bi-weekly Twitter Space called “Swift Package Indexing”.
We’ve tried a few different formats, but it has settled on being a casual chat about what’s going on with development on Swift Package Index, a discussion of upcoming features, package recommendations, occasional interviews with package authors, and even a semi-regular quiz.
Twitter Spaces is very convenient, but it’s far from ideal in terms of both recording and consumption. We had a few requests for it to be a more traditional podcast, so we re-launched it this week. We liked the live-listening aspect of Spaces, so we kept that by streaming it to YouTube live, and there’s a podcast feed in the works, too!
I’d love it if you’d give this first re-launch episode a listen/watch on YouTube. We already scheduled the next episode, so set a reminder to listen live. Or, if you prefer to listen to it as a podcast, I’ll have the feed URL for you next week.
We’d love any feedback about the idea, format, or topic suggestions. Hit reply and let me know what you think!
So, 9.9.2014 has been announced and as always, the rumours are going crazy. I think there's a secret announcement hidden in the numbers though. 9+9+2014 divided by 64 (the 5s is a 64 bit processor) divided by 10.1 (Puma, because no one ever gives Puma any love) comes out close enough to π that I think this definitely means that next week's big announcement is that every purchase at an Apple retail store gets free Apple pie. You heard it here first.
As for a wearable/watch/band/unicorn if you want my opinion on what's coming on that front then I'll be sitting here on this particularly comfortable fence. I have absolutely no idea but I'll have my credit card ready and waiting on the 9th.
So of course we got the new iPhone, and yes the "wearable" turned out to be a watch. The big surprise of the event to me was Pay. Huge news! As for the watch? I've tried but I just can't get excited about it, not because of the 1st gen hardware which will be revised and refined over the next few years, but because of the fundamental limitations of a device with a screen on my wrist. I've read a few things which have almost changed my mind but it doesn't feel like the future of Apple to me.
When we look back at this keynote in years to come, I think we'll see Pay as the big announcement rather than the Watch. I'll probably end up being completely wrong about that though, it certainly wouldn't be the first time 😉.
With six hours of iTunes Connect maintenance on Sunday (yes Apple, I got all 24 emails you sent to make sure I knew about it! 😄), it seems likely that we'll be getting our hands on iTunes Connect Analytics. We have never had access to this kind of data before (app store page views, conversion rates, etc...) and I can't wait to take a look. If you want a reminder of what is likely to be delivered in the update then skip on to 15:38 in "The New iTunes Connect" session video for a recap.
Update: All of those emails from Apple about the maintenance time and I still didn't read them properly. As Jeff Hunter points out on Twitter the maintenance is next Sunday, not this Sunday... Thanks Jeff!
Hello from San Francisco!
If you were planning to watch the keynote at AltConf, it has unfortunately had to be cancelled (Note: AltConf itself isn't cancelled! Just the streaming of sessions). I do understand that it breaks the rebroadcasting rule but Apple could have either looked the other way, or even worked with the AltConf organisers to make it legal rather than do this. Really disappointing.
Update: Apple have reversed the decision and the keynote and state of the union sessions are once again going to be streamed at AltConf. Great news! Thank you Apple.
Wherever you're going to watch the keynote, enjoy WWDC! I'll be back next week with a round up of everything you've inevitably already read about! 👍
Just over a week until WWDC! With the Swift roadmap and 3.0 features already out in the open, I'm not expecting too many announcements on that front. However, I'm really looking forward to the changes that we'll see in the iOS/tvOS/watchOS and OS X SDKs.
Now that we can talk freely about beta SDKs thanks to the relaxed NDA, this next few months is always my favourite part of the year. I enjoy linking to articles on Swift, but what really excites me about iOS development is the apps we can build with it and that's more about UIKit and friends. We're about to get a whole new set of toys to play with and I can't wait to see what Apple have been working on... 👍
What an amazing week for Apple. Not only did their stock climb more than 4%, but even more exciting is that the iPad and Apple Watch are selling a lot better than they have in previous years. Great news for developers!
We also finally saw the retirement of two old classic iPod models, the nano and shuffle. A few days ago, Apple removed them from their site, and issued a statement that they were simplifying their iPod lineup down to just two models of iPod touch. Of course, this won't affect developers but I'm wondering if the days of the iPod touch are also numbered? 😦
Oh, and yes we've seen the likely design and UI implications of the next phone from the HomePod leak, but you all know we don't really do that kind of stuff here, no matter how exciting it is! 🙈