I think the biggest news from the morning was that Mac is officially moving on from Intel chips and over to Apple’s own ARM-based processor. This transition, taking place over the next couple of years, will bring the company’s desktop and laptop computers closer the iPhone and iPad hardware architecture and make the millions of App Store apps developers have already made for those mobile devices available on Mac.
Of course, as it does each year at WWDC, Apple also intro’d new versions for all of its various operating systems as well as developer tools, including Xcode 12.
So, I’d love to hear what devs working in the Apple space found most interesting from the day’s announcements. Anything here going to drastically change the way you work?
There are definitely pros and cons to chip move. The more proprietary, the more important security will be -- and the more expensive the tech becomes, costs that will undoubtedly be passed on to the user. The next two years will be interesting no doubt, not only at Apple, but I think, industry wide, and also economically speaking.
As a consumer I'm most excited for the surround sound on the Airpods. As a developer I'm most excited for the Web Extensions API. Apparently it's been around for a while, but this is the first I've heard of it.
It was nice to see a WWDC address without the audience for a change. The live WWDC has been a complete zoo for the past few years. It's clear they want to set up the iPad as a laptop replacement of some kind, and giving desktop apps a path for emulation and cross compilation is part of that.
Changes in the iOS "Springboard" are still bad: Apple refuses to admit that the metaphor of icons on some kind of table is a horrid metaphor that only works for about 20 icons. Now they'll have about three new ways to be confused about where your apps are. I sincerely doubt that the self organizing page will be able to figure out how to organize all my synthesizer and effects apps and plugins. They still don't allow you to put a folder of icons inside a folder of icons.
New ways of organizing conversations are welcome, I'm curious to see how well that actually works. Details will turn up in the lectures.
There are definitely pros and cons to chip move. The more proprietary, the more important security will be -- and the more expensive the tech becomes, costs that will undoubtedly be passed on to the user. The next two years will be interesting no doubt, not only at Apple, but I think, industry wide, and also economically speaking.
As a consumer I'm most excited for the surround sound on the Airpods. As a developer I'm most excited for the Web Extensions API. Apparently it's been around for a while, but this is the first I've heard of it.
It was nice to see a WWDC address without the audience for a change. The live WWDC has been a complete zoo for the past few years. It's clear they want to set up the iPad as a laptop replacement of some kind, and giving desktop apps a path for emulation and cross compilation is part of that.
Changes in the iOS "Springboard" are still bad: Apple refuses to admit that the metaphor of icons on some kind of table is a horrid metaphor that only works for about 20 icons. Now they'll have about three new ways to be confused about where your apps are. I sincerely doubt that the self organizing page will be able to figure out how to organize all my synthesizer and effects apps and plugins. They still don't allow you to put a folder of icons inside a folder of icons.
New ways of organizing conversations are welcome, I'm curious to see how well that actually works. Details will turn up in the lectures.