WWDC17 @ San Jose
A trip to Apple’s yearly developer conference
It’s that time of year again! The holiday season for Apple developers, otherwise known as the Worldwide Developers Conference. This was the first year I was lucky enough to win Apple’s ticket lottery system and attend. It was also the first year since 2002 the event was hosted in beautiful San Jose. Finally, I had my chance to get up at 5AM and wait in line for a WWDC keynote. Ten years after the iPhone was announced, there was no shortage of new hardware, SDKs and amazing demos of unreleased apps. Here are some of my favorite announcements:
- iOS11: If you’ve been using the Apple Music app then you’ll be familiar with many of the interface updates since the large heading style is now uniform across the board. This includes the completely overhauled App Store. A couple of the biggest features of iOS11 are the new Files app and Drag and Drop. Files organizes content from your cloud storage accounts such as Box, Dropbox etc. With Drag and Drop you can easily select and move multiple files or other objects not just within the same app but to other apps as well. It’s one of those things that seems simple, but once we start using it we’ll never know how we lived without it.
- CoreML: CoreML brings on-device machine learning to your app. With just a few lines of code you can import trained model data into your app and start running super fast predictions. The user’s data never needs to leave the device and it works without a network connection. You can convert your existing models to the Core ML model format and directly import that to your project.
- Xcode 9: For many of us, the most immediately impacting announcements were around Xcode 9. It’s quite an experience being part of a room of thousands of people cheering over filesystem management, refactoring and faster indexing. Moving a file in Xcode now moves it on the filesystem as well! 🎉 Xcode 9 also features brand new integration with Github and over the air device debugging. Most of these features have been desired for quite a while, but seeing them all come together and trying them out is awesome.
- ARKit: ARKit is a new framework allowing developers to more easily integrate Augmented Reality into their apps. ARKit will support Apple’s SceneKit and SpriteKit as well as the popular Unity and UnrealEngine. By opening up AR to more developers, Apple is now calling its devices the “largest AR platform in the world.”
- watchOS4: Hard to believe we’re already at version 4 of watchOS. The 4th version will bring a new Siri watch face that shows you information based on what it thinks you need to know at the time. And let’s be honest, I’ll be using the Jessie from Toy Story watch face more that I’ll want to admit.
- Safari 11: One of the biggest updates to Safari was the long awaited WebRTC support, which will bring more video/audio sharing capabilities to the browser, including Safari on mobile.
It‘s impossible to mention all of the week’s announcements, but you can learn about the rest in your spare time with the recorded sessions from WWDC online.
Attending the labs
One of the highly recommended parts of the conference to me was the interactive labs. The labs are essentially open office hours where you can sit down with Apple engineers and designers and discuss your applications and ask for technical help on current and new features. The User Interface Design Consultation is one of the most popular labs that you need to schedule an appointment for bright and early when the registration opens every day. I managed to get one of the appointments on Friday, and it was a great experience to have designers take a look at an app they haven’t seen before and give feedback. Fresh and unbiased eyes are always super helpful. If you have a chance to go to that lab, sign up early! When I wasn’t at the labs, I attended as many of the sessions as I could. The “What’s New” sessions give the best high level overviews of new SDK features. If you only have time to watch one, go with the Platforms State of the Union.
Fireside chat with Michelle Obama
A surprise pleasure of WWDC was hearing Michelle Obama interviewed by Lisa Jackson. She shared stories from her incredible journey as First Lady, her current travels around the world, and the future work for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. When asked for advice for a room full of developers and entrepreneurs, she talked a lot about influence. We often think of influence from big to small, but she advised to start small. Influence the people that you already can, and go from there. If you can’t fix your own backyard you’re going to have a hard time fixing someone else’s. On how to deal with the particularly difficult state of affairs, I quoted her response in the following tweet, which much to my astonishment went quickly semi-viral:
Pins!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the side goal of every attendee: collecting all 18 of the most adorable pins ever that Apple distributed at various events during the conference. If you feel like you’re missing out, you can still have them all in the WWDC iMessage sticker pack. However, if you have an ‘activity ring’ pin you don’t want, I’m missing that one 😉
Conclusion
As with many conferences, sometimes the most influential moments are the chats while waiting in lines, meeting new people at evening events and running into friends of friends that remind you that it’s a small world. It doesn’t seem like that long ago I was streaming a tiny grainy video from Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynotes years ago, or visiting the brand new Apple Store in Arizona to watch with a group of Apple fans. If I never win the lottery again, this was a blast! Hopefully though in some capacity or another I’ll be seeing you all next year. 😊
Many thanks to Cisco Emerge for sending me!
