Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) wrapped up at San Jose on 9th June.
It was my first WWDC and special in all sense. This year’s WWDC celebrates the 10th anniversary of Apple’s iPhone, the revolutionary device changed everything! As a company Apple is more evolved around iPhone over the past decade. Though it’s 10th year of iPhone, the event was more around the platforms and technologies than emphasising iPhone.
WWDC this year witnessed 5300 attendees, the largest ever and 1000 Apple engineers to make an awesome developer conference. San Jose McEnery Convention Center is located right at the heart of Silicon Valley. The downtown area is well connected with excellent public transport like VTA and all other facilities around.
Thanks VTA for the convenient and cheap rides. It was quite useful for foreign attendees like me.
We could sense the vibes of WWDC as we entered the streets of downtown San Jose. The streets were decorated with posters of the event. San Jose convention center was decorated beautifully with the people theme they created for this year WWDC. The badge collection day (04 Jun) was super convenient and easy with helpful staffs. It’s also an opportunity to meet and greet fellow developers from the community before they dwelve in to busy sessions from next day onwards.
Keynote
WWDC this year was themed around Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Conversational Interfaces and Privacy
The keynote covered the software updates, hardware updates and introduction of a new device HomePod. Tim Cook and other Apple executives meticulously presented the updates. The biggest announcements were naturally on iOS platform and tooling around it. Overnight, with the announcements with Augment Reality, iOS would become the largest ever augment reality mobile platform and it works well with their existing product lines.
Hardware Updates
HomePod
New hardware announcements are not unfamiliar at WWDC. HomePod is designed as a music companion for your home, powered with Siri Voice Assistant.
As the product description says, it’s designed to bring down your house.
Spatial awareness in HomePod controls the direction of sound based on where it is placed in the room. It can also work well in a multi HomePod configuration to optimize the sound delivery.
Apple introduced HomePod connected with their existing hardware ecosystem and software services. While other similar products in the market talks about a voice assistant, Apple pitched it as a music companion for home, delivers high fidelity sound. Though Siri is the key feature drives the device, they still talk about music and quality of sound.
The Pro Updates — iMac/MacBook/iPad
All Pro hardware lines are updated this year.
iMac received a bad-ass Pro version with whopping 18 core computing power with excellent graphics capabilities. This is a great update for pro users to create great content like movies, game, VR etc. Softwares like FinalCut Pro already updated to take advantage of modern hardware and introduced capabilities to edit VR content.
MacBook Pro offers better configurations and improved keyboard in the new release. The external GPU support in the High Sierra helps Apple to strike a balance with their general users and power users need extended configuration.
Trimmed bezel and display improvements, notably the refresh rates with iPad Pro make it a great companion. Several updates on iOS 11 focus on iPads with excellent multi-tasking support. The reviews are out on new iPad Pro and many people agree that 120Hz refresh rate is just awesome!
Machine Learning and Augmented Reality
We were looking at you Apple
Apple turning the iOS platform to next level by integrating modern technologies to the platform, harnessing the power of existing hardware ecosystem. Those who are in the game of machine learning, it’s more of a server side thing. Apple taking it to a whole new level by offering machine learning capabilities built right into the platform. Apple heavily emphasizes on the device capabilities and privacy of user data in favor of on-device processing. The current versions of iPhones are 120x faster than the original iPhone. Many of the machine learning, NLP, AR algorithms are running in just a few milliseconds.
Augmented Reality with AR Kit
Augmented Reality Comes first for Apple, though VR is the new buzzword
Apple made a careful choice to choose a technology that works with their hardware ecosystems. The huge success of Pokemon Go also denotes the success of augment reality. iOS is the best platform for gaming. Every year game developers breaks the limits and bring in amazing experience to its users, leveraging the benefits of hardware and software platform.
The Wingnut AR demo from Unreal Engine amazed the crowd. This show the power of AR capabilities built in to the platform.
ARKit is an open-ended design where the developers can leverage rendering engines of their choice, like Apple’s SceneKit, SpriteKit or third party Unity, UnrealEngine etc. More companies are collaborating with Apple on AR products like Ikea, Pokemon Go etc.Apple made is super easy for all developers to take advantage of machine learning and AR capabilities with their developer tools. It’s no more a niche developer’s game!
Machine Learning with Core ML
Apple broke its silence in the area of machine learning. The answer is on-device processing.
Your apps can now leverage the goodness of machine learning with Core ML. Apple offers pre-trained ML models ready to integrate with your iOS project. CoreML also introduced a new file format (mlmodel) which can be easily integrated with your project.
Apple encourages to use the pre-trained models available in the machine learning community. CoreML Tools, a python based tool helps to easily convert your models to mlmodel format. Xcode auto-generates the Swift classes ready to work with your project.
Apple’s machine learning models are downloaded from cloud as machine learning models tends to get improved over the time.
The privacy focus encourages developers to do more on-device processing. Current machine learning algorithms are generally executed on the cloud. On-device processing can reduce risk of security and privacy of user data. Apple also talks about differential privacy introduced last year to anonymously collect the data.
Xcode Improvements
The new version of Xcode comes with some great updates. What you would immediately notice is the wireless debugging capabilities, excellent refactoring support and a super responsive editor rewritten in Swift.
Refactoring engine now works well for Swift, Objective-C, C++ and C.
There are tons of updates with runtime profilers and sanitizers. Main thread checker, address sanitizer, thread sanitizer, undefined sanitizer etc. helps to make your app more solid during development time itself. Main Thread Checker is going to help us a lot in large projects (even smaller ones) to ensure the UI updates are being called only from main thread.
Apple offers a new build system which has 2x performance over the previous build system. This is going to help us more during the development with incremental builds. The new build system is still in a beta phase and need to enable separately. Obviously you can’t submit builds to AppStore using the product in beta phase.
Xcode is now integrated GitHub for easier use and streamlined workflows.
The indexers are more sensible and less resource hungry than before. The indexers in the new version of Xcode is faster and works well with the build system to improve the indexing processing. There are some other new features like Markdown Support, Editor Zoom etc.
Swift 4
Many of the Swift updates were already known to the community as Swift is an open source project. Swift adoption and evolution were quite faster than any other languages. It’s beautiful to see the great community contribution to make the language tooling more mature and stable.
Apple using Swift more than ever before. The new super responsive Xcode 9 editor is rewritten using Swift. Apple Music is another example which has lot of Swift code in it.
Adopting this was never been easier for many of the early adopters. At Experion Technologies, we adopted Swift at very early stage and we had gone through the several pros and cons of the language. We are 100% Swift company nand use Objective-C only if absolutely required. Swift community is doing a fantastic job on making the language and tooling more stable across versions.
Swift 4 achieves source level compatibility with version 4. However, migration from Swift 2.x to 3.x is still a painful job. The community is focusing more on ABI Stability (binary compatibility) along with source compatibility. The new Xcode 9 Editor is completely written in Swift and there were several indications that Apple Music team using both Objective-C and Swift for development. This is a promising news for the community.
Read More: Swift Evolution
Core Technology Updates
Though there are not serious updates in the user experience, Apple updated several core technologies across all OSes especially on iOS and macOS.
macOS, watchOS and tvOS are going to get all the goodness of APFS file system with High Sierra update. APFS is a new file system from Apple released last year with iOS 10. The new file system optimized for flash drives, SSDs and focuses with a primary focus on encryption. Copy/Clones doesn’t add up anymore to the storage as they’re referring back to the original file system. A copy will be created only when a user changes the file. This is generally called CoW (Copy-on-Write).
HEVC (Highly Efficient Video Coding, H265) delivers high quality 4K content with up to 40% smaller size than the previous H264 content. HEIF (Highly Efficient Image Format) can save up to 50% of space for your images. This is a big win for iOS users where storage is always an expensive affair. You can store more data with new image and video formats.
Both APFS and new image and video enhancements should give more bang for storage bucks.
Metal 2 APIs are refined and performs better than previous version and the prime factor driving all new great innovations like AR, VR, Machine Learning, Computer Vision etc.
The Labs
Technology Labs and Design Labs are the highlights of WWDC. Labs facilitate the attendees to directly work with Apple Engineers to solve their problems or clarifies their questions. Design labs are always high on demand and can be booked through the WWDC apps. The slots get filled in within seconds. An Apple designer will review your app design and user experience for 15 minutes.
Michelle Obama
On Day 2 Michelle Obama joined the developer conference for a fireside chat. It was a surprise event which was announced by Tim Cook towards the end of Keynote. Michelle Obama covered several topics including the climate changes, life after White House, diversity etc.
Lunch Time Sessions
Apple presented invited speakers during lunch sessions.
The story of Todd Stabelfeldt was touch and inspiring. He reminded us about accessibility and including everyone when you consider building your apps.
What an an amazing career it was of Dr. Catherine Dardern! Dr. Catherine and some of her fellow mathematicians earned the nickname of human computers for their extra ordinary abilities in mathematics at NASA. She’s the first African-American woman in senior management at NASA-Langley. The book Hidden Figures is based on the remarkable story of Dr. Catherine, one among the pioneering mathematicians.
Miral Kotb’s iLuminate team entertained us with amazing performance with their light suits! The session filled with dance performances of their team. She was one among the attendees at WWDC 2009 where was triggered with the idea of controlling lights using mobile. Miral explained her story right from designing the a small board with lights and reached to the finals of America Got Talent.
Recommended Sessions
The design team had 8 great sessions this year. All their sessions were very useful. One of the best sessions I had was Design of Sound. It’s highly recommended to watch all the design sessions.
It was a great experience this year at WWDC. The platforms are taking new directions with modern technologies integrated built into the platform. The tools are becoming more intelligent and helpful for all developers leverage these new updates. Start coding!
Some Photos
No WWDC attendees would want to miss the bash! This time Fall Out Boy rocked the stage for us.
Throughout the event, Mohan was with me all the time! We met at WWDC and from nearby cities! Obvisouly we speak same language. Mohan achieved his success as a doctor and a developer, a very rare combination. Thank you Mohan.
The jacket was quite unique and identify a WWDC attendee. Well yeah the pins turned out to be a serious thing throughout the event and collected plenty of them!
I was more than lucky to watch Keynote from 3rd row, sitting right next to the producer of Keynote. And yeah spotted Sir Jony Ive right in the front!
Bye Bye. See you again
One last thing, I got my tag signed by Tim Cook, how’s that?
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