WWDC18 Keynote Announcements

Published in

tajawal

5 min readJun 5, 2018

This year just like every year we got Apple’s Word Wide Developer Conference, This isn’t like an iPhone launch or a hardware lunch this isn’t something like that this is just basiclly Apple talking to developers about what they have been working on in terms of software macOS, WatchOS, iOS and tvOS.

Putting updates into order:

Apple tv:

The tvOS just got little minor updates nothing particularly major, they got: Dolby Atmos support for better audio experiance, added some live and news channels, video screen savers from space station.

Augmented reality:

This got pretty big push from Apple this year specially in iOS, they announced a new file format called USDZ which already have support from Adobe and it’s a way for sharing AR experiances so you can share these files put them on apps or websites and there is a bunch more ARKit enhancements from last year so they made some major changes where they introduced ARKit 2.0. They also announced new app called the Measure app and it’s an augmented reality ruler just lets you point your camera at things and measure them on the screen.
And the most technically impressive use of AR experiance is you can simultaneously share AR experiance between two devices so you can have two different devices looking at two different angles at the same thing at the same time and interacting with it, the demo SwiftShot they introduced was pretty incredible.

This is a big step forward in AR, so it’s cool to see Apple push this forward.

Apple Watch:

It got some improvements in watchOS 5, so there is new sharing activity competing against your friends and there is a new workout typs for things like yoga, out door running and also automatic workout detection in case you start workout but forgot to start the watch it will know when you started. There is also the walkie talkie mode if you want to walkie talkie someone instead of just calling them, also there is posdcast app coming to the watch and the raise to talk feature which will detect when you rais your hand and start siri.

macOS:

The new exiting macOS named Mojave it will be a free upgrade for macOS and the biggest nice feature was dark mode where it’s not just truning the menu dark but it turns everything dark, also they announced the App Store redesign and also now voice memos, stockes, news and the home app are coming to macOS and the most interesting part here that it’s coming from iOS UIKit apps on macOS so people who develop iOS apps they only have to add couple of lines of code to bring that entire experience to the mac which is pretty cool. They also introduced Desktop Stacks so if you have a messy desktop you can have it automatically organaized and arranged in stackes by file type.

iOS 12:

It was the best thing that was announced this year in WWDC18 because it’s a big update where it will go down to iPhone 5s which will improve the device performance by 2x, so they consitrate on things like faster animations, faster loading and reloading also making things more responsive which was great to see.

The next big announcement in iOS was grouped notifications which is a really big improvement since iOS notifications now are big complain if you just scroll through the iOS notifications it’s just a long list of unneeded notifications so iOS notifications from the same app will get stacked together same as in macOS DeskTop Stacks so they are more organized, you can keep or you can clear all of them one at a time.

Another big announcement for iOS is group FaceTime, so you can now have group calls using FaceTime which will show in deck style and you can call 32 people in one at once and it’s just the same video call.

Siri also got some improvements but it wasn’t much catch up to google assistant. Siri now got new feature called shortcuts so you can create a set of commands and as siri to exeucte these commands because you just made that up, so you can say Hey Siri, Heading Home and in the app you can set different commands to be executed like set the thermostat to 70 degrees, open the navigation app and start navigating to your home, text your ETA to your friend also play music in the car, all of that just by saying two words, that’s definitely useful and they way I see it it’s a new way of automating your workflows.

Also a set of new Animojis were annoucned today and the new Memoji where it will let you make a custome animoji for your character it’s like a cartoon version of your self. They also talked about tongue detection and you can use Animoji and Memoji in FaceTime.

These were the keystone updates in iOS but there are also other couple of features like search in photos and search suggestions and also the new app screen where gives you the ability to track overall use of your phone so you can observe how much time you spend on a certin app and cut down the usage of the app by restricting the time you spend on it and also the parental control on this is pretty cool.

In general a lot of improvements under the hood and a couple big new iOS features that’s what’s new in iOS 12 and nothing related to design so it will have the same look at iOS 11 but with new features. And that was it.

Later I will cover more technical topics in the next article, topic like: