Some thoughts on the WWDC keynote

by Volker Weber



I cannot remember that Apple ever talked about so much new stuff in a single keynote. Where do I start? In no particular order:

watchOS 6 runs on all watchOS 5 hardware. All Macs from 2012 onwards support macOS Catalina. iOS 13 drops the iPhone 5S and 6, keeping all others. iPadOS will run on iPad Air 2 and newer, including all iPad Pro, iPad mini 4+ and iPad 5+.

The 2018 iPad Pro made me use an iPad as my only computer, switching from a Surface Pro. I was concerned I did not have access to USB thumb drives but never really needed one. I keep running Windows computers and switch between the iPad Pro and Surface as well as Yoga, but I don't have to. iPadOS will only accelerate this move.

The video that Apple did not show:

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Comments

The only use I ever had for iTunes is backup and restore of iPhone and iPads. Well, actually not even myself, because I don't own any iStuff. But the ... (how do you translate "Scheffin"?) made good use of it in the past and probably in the near future. Will B&R move to Finder?

Robert Dahlem, 2019-06-03

Yes

Volker Weber, 2019-06-03

The question is: where will it move on Windows? Or will they integrate Calendar and Mail into iTunes in the Windows version as shown? ;-)

Jonas Rathert, 2019-06-04

You didn't mention that mouse support seems to be available as an Accessibility option (when needed. The UI demonstrations during the keynote hinted there would be no conceptual obstacles to this, at least).

In some of the industries we support data loggers are a fact of life. They almost universally present themselves as a USB-mounted filesystem with their data in Excel or CSV format - no need to resort to private APIs to grab that data now :-)

wrt AR, imagine you perform engineering surveys over time on equipment for which measurements must be taken regularly at the same spot. Now imagine using your iPad or iPhone to overlay the correct measurement locations on the object you're inspecting. If you have a HUD display for the measurement locations, you've just saved one or more hours of groundwork which would otherwise be spent taking physical measurements to simply set up for the actual readings.

Apple tends to play to mass market journalists and young developers at these events. Even when there are actual grown-up usage cases, they don't get the stage.

And yes, SwiftUI was the most significant thing showcased - I've lost count of the number of half-baked libraries and frameworks I've used or created over the years to do just this sort of thing. Unlike Facebook's entries over the past half decade, this appears to be useful for general app development rather than just a newsfeed.

David Richardson, 2019-06-04

UIkit:

With Swift, Apple added a modern programming language.
Objective C is from the 90s and shows its age.
Swift makes it more comfortable to write code.
Meaning: Less code for the same problem.

SwiftUI is just a UI framework that is optimized for Swift.
It takes full advantage of the language features.
It makes it more comfortable to handle GUI code.

There is nothing magic about it: The AR features would have been technically possible with the older UIKit and also without Swift.

But it SwiftUI looks like a very good package.
From what I can see, it easily rivals everything else out there for mobile UI development.

Timo Stamm, 2019-06-04

The SwiftUI demo briefly (very briefly) made me want to fire up Xcode and start developing again. I envy the tools and packages "youngsters" can use to develop now - especially for mobile applications. I weep silently when I remember how we used to develop WML/WAP "apps" back in the day.

Time to buy that rocking chair and move to the porch.

Matthew Langham, 2019-06-04

Yes, mouse can be used ... tested with Wireless Magic Mouse. But as far as I know it's not limted to that.

It works, but you have to get used to the way how it works (and decide what you put on the second button ... I made it "Home" for a fast way to leave an app)

Harald Gärttner, 2019-06-05

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