The WWDC conference week is over, and today we learned who won Apple Design Awards. Now it's time for us, developers, to dive in and learn newly released frameworks, fix all related issues, and prepare our apps for the public releases of new operating systems. Before that, I decided to do a small summary with my perspective on what happened during the week.
I was curious how this year, an entirely online event will look like compared to onsite one. I need to say I like how it went. Keynote and Platforms State of the Union were pretty fun to watch, especially with all the shots of Apple Park. All the talks were prerecorded with exceptional quality, released daily. Format of the videos was great, instead of sticking to specific presentation time-slots, we got talks that are as long as needed. Excellent addition to everything was recap videos, with a short glance on what was discussed during the day and what we can expect tomorrow.
During the conference week, I spend most of my time around labs. I had a plan and list of issues I wanted to discuss with Apple engineers and tried to put as much time as I can into it. The application process was pretty easy, selecting a specific lab and filling up the form with some necessary information about the topic you want to discuss. I've been lucky because all of my applications were selected, and I was able to spend some time solving my bugs with engineers responsible for building the frameworks I'm using. All folks were super helpful, trying to understand the problem and work out some solutions. There was no time constraint, during one lab, I had more than 1 hour long debugging session with the engineer from Apple. Comparing this year's format to the onsite WWDC, I was missing a few things: group open conversations and the possibility to spend the whole day at the lab zone and chat with Apple engineers whenever they are free.
From the user point of view, I like the new design of macOS Big Sur, it brings some freshness to the system and tries to unify and clean up design language for the platform. I'm also excited about Mac transition to Apple Silicon. This move will open many new possibilities in terms of processing power, battery life, and optimizations explicitly made for macOS. Apple is known for software and hardware integration, and I think that this transition is a step in the right direction. Finally, we will have Picture-in-Picture on iOS and tvOS, a feature I had on my wishlist for quite some time. As a developer, one of the things I'm delighted to see is SwiftUI improvements. Apple started using SwiftUI in some system-level components like the new control center on macOS, which means that it is ready to be used on production. Some of the released features, like Widgets, can be built exclusively in SwiftUI, which will push more developers to use this framework. I liked everything about Widgets and App Clips, and I'm sure I will be exploring more of that soon. It also means that Apple is pushing us, developers, to think differently about how we are building our apps.
As I mentioned before, I didn't have a lot of time during the week to keep up with all the sessions. Right now, I'm trying to catch up with all the new stuff, but I can recommend a few videos I already watched:
Time for a small recap, I enjoyed the conference this year, and I'm ready to dive in and build some things with all the stuff released this year. Of course, Apple can make some improvements to the online format of the WWDC. First, we need to see if Apple will stick to the online version of the conference next year or onsite venue will be back. I would like to see a mix of both.