We are less than 24 hours from the keynote opening WWDC20, and as the first post on my new website, I decided to share my thoughts on the topic. This year, because of the current state of the world, the conference is online, which is a considerable change. I was in San Jose in 2018, and I'm curious to see and compare this year's event to an onsite one.
This year, every developer will be able to sign up and talk to Apple engineers. I have a few topics I would like to discuss, and I hope that I will be able to do it. Labs are limited, and I assume that only some questions will be selected. Remember to research it before, try new Apple Developer Forums and see if you can find your answer there first. The most important thing to do before your lab is to prepare everything. Make sure you have your topic ready and have some sample projects where you can show everything you would like to achieve or a bug you are trying to solve. Labs are an essential part of the whole conference, so spend your time with Apple engineers entirely.
Almost every post about WWDC20 must include a wishlist of new features we would like to see in new system releases. I'm super excited to see everything that Apple will show, but for me, the most significant improvements and enhancements for current ones.
I want to use some of the current internal components that Apple have in their apps, such as Maps, Health, or Activity. Right now, if you want to have some modern UI interface with some fancy sheet UI or pretty looking charts, you need to spend hours trying to reimplement it yourself. Besides UI components, there are some other internal elements that I would love to see as a part of the official SDKs. (write which ones)
Apple bought Buddybuild in 2018, and we are still waiting to see what team behind one of the best Continous Integration and Deployment service can do at Apple. I hope that we will be able to see what they've been working on. We already saw the redesign of the App Store Connect web interface, so maybe it is a small hint that something in this field is on the way. We need the first-party solution that will also include things like proper crash reporting or analytics.
There are some of the features which are available on one platform I would like to see on other ones. One of them is picture-in-picture. It would be nice to have it on iOS (not only iPadOS). Expanding HealthKit to iPadOS and macOS would be great, same with the Health app. Bringing Shortcuts to macOS would also open a lot of new possibilities for users and developers.
Last point on my list, but I would say that this one is the most important. We all know that documentation we get for all new stuff is not perfect. Apple needs to give us developers, proper documentation so we can spend more time building new features or adding newly releaded stuff to our apps and not on trying to figure out how some undocumented parts of the SDK work. It would be great if Apple provides something like SwiftUI tutorials for newly released software and fix that for currently undocumented parts of the SDKs.
My wishlist has only a few points, and I would be happy to see that at least one of them happens tomorrow.
Recently, there are a lot of rumors about Apple moving from Intel chips to ARM ones. Some well-informed journalists are pointing that the announcement will happen at this year's WWDC. I'm curious how they will approach it and how this whole developer transition will look like.
I hope that you enjoyed my first post and if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to ping me on Twitter.