WWDC 2014 Keynote (and Aftermath) Reactions

By now, I’m sure almost anybody interested in mobile development in general, and iOS development in particular, has seen the WWDC keynote video or has read about what was revealed at the keynote. I’ve been going over everything since the keynote and since it appears that Apple might at least be partially lifting the NDA (at least according to these posts), I thought I’d jot down my thoughts in between watching WWDC session videos 🙂

Just so you know, I’m not going to be talking about anything revealed during the WWDC session videos (at least the ones released so far). Instead, I simply want to talk about the big picture stuff – the stuff revealed during the keynote. Even there, wow, how much is there to talk about?

First of all, I’m just staggered by the number of features that was announced. Sure, some of it was expected but there was some really exciting stuff there that just came out of the left field 🙂

From my own wish list of items (I mentioned those in my previous post, here), some items did make the cut. Apple did revamp their keyboard with the QuickType keyboard. But not content with that, they also opened things up to allow third-party keyboards. That’s huge! I’m looking forward to the variety of keyboard functionality we might have soon – at least three well-known Android alternative keyboard developers are already on board to bring their keyboards to iOS according to what I’ve read.

But even if Apple had not opened up the keyboard, it looks as if the new QuickType keyboard might have been enough. It does a far better job than the old iOS text prediction system and according to Apple, not only will QuickType predict words, it will also predict phrases and sentences. So, good times ahead 😀

We didn’t get user profiles or system profiles with iOS 8. But what we did get was family sharing. It’s not quite the same thing but it’s something. It does solve an issue that I at least have had quite a bit of the time – how do I share apps or content that I’ve bought on iTunes, with my wife easily? Family sharing does seem to address that part of the issue. Of course, it still doesn’t address how I keep my high score intact when my wife takes over my iDevice … but baby steps, I suppose 🙂

SpriteKit did get a fair number of enhancements. I’m happy about that since that seems to indicate that Apple is serious about helping game developers. I still haven’t had enough time to play with SpriteKit and so don’t know all the interesting bits. Plus, talking about additional stuff is probably not wise at this point.

The same probably goes for universal storyboards – a feature that I did get to see a bit more in action 🙂 I don’t know how much I can talk about, but it’s definitely looking like Apple is ticking another box in their plan – the one I mentioned in my previous post where I said that I was sure that Apple had a roadmap on how to extend the UI for iOS. Or rather, the building of the UI for iOS. I’m very interested to see where that goes.

But one thing that I can talk about (and everybody already is talking about) is Swift! I believe that that announcement caught almost everybody totally by surprise. And what a surprise it has been! I think a lot of people are going to be talking about Swift for a long time to come – at least, I hope so since I love the language and all the nifty features it brings with it.

If you haven’t checked it out, at least do yourself the favour of downloading the free e-book that Apple made available the same day as the keynote, here. The first 40 pages or so should be enough to get you up to speed on the basics and all the goodies that Swift has to offer.

I’ve heard a lot about Swift over the last day or so – some people are like, “I don’t want to learn another language!”, and others say “Why did they have to go create a new language instead of enhancing an existing one?”. I’ve heard still others moaning about how long it’ll take them to learn the ins and outs of Swift.

I don’t want to get into each of those issues. Plus, some of those topics can be pretty subjective depending on where you’re standing. But what I can tell you is that I understood the basics of Swift within a couple of hours (and 40 or so pages of the above mentioned e-book). Swift is nothing new, the syntax and the coding structure should be pretty familiar to you if you’ve worked in Objective-C, Lua, PHP, Java etc.

But what it does is make your iOS development work that much faster and better 🙂 No more header files. No more lengthy lines of code to simply set up a string just the way you want. No more @ signs.

Instead, you get cleaner, more concise, and more powerful code that works with the same iOS APIs and classes you’ve already come to learn – if you’re an iOS developer that is 🙂 I, for one, am looking forward to doing a lot of coding using Swift. Bring it on!

Tweets for 2014-06-03

• So far, everything I’ve seen about Swift has been an improvement. I think I’m going to like this language 🙂 #swift
• Swift removes the hassles around formatted strings, removes all the @s, and adds returning multiple values from a function via tuples. Win!
• Yaws-might, Yawse-mitty, Yawse-mighty … That’s just a very confusing name – I think I’ll just call it Sam 😀

What I’m Interested to Hear from WWDC 2014

It’s interesting to speculate about what Apple will reveal tomorrow. Leaving aside the hardware speculations, there’s always a lot to wish for on the software side. While iOS is already on version 7 (has it been that long?) it still has a lot of areas that need work. Will Apple fix any of these? That’s the question …

For instance, there’s the whole issue of input – I mean keyboard input. Apple has been sticking to their own keyboard since iOS was introduced and so far it doesn’t look as if they’re going to loosen their grip. And that’s rather annoying for those of us who want to get any typing done on the iOS virtual keyboard 🙂 Apple’s suggestion mechanism for the keyboard just doesn’t cut it for fast typists. I really wish they’d open up the keyboard so that we can have choices. Will that ever happen though? No idea.

Another area that can use a lot of work is that of profiles – both user profiles and system profiles. By user profiles, I mean the ability for different people to use the same iDevice in parallel. Granted, this isn’t a huge deal most of the time except for games on a phone – I just hate it when somebody takes my phone, starts playing a game and goes through a level that I hadn’t played 🙂 But on iPads where more people tend to share the same device, the issue even extends to areas like contacts, calendars and so on. So it would be nice if there was a way for multiple people to share the same device without stomping all over each others’ data and settings.

But more importantly, iOS still lacks any kind of system profile functionality. Here, what I mean is being able to have a set of customized device settings that you can switch to at will. For instance, I might not want the phone ringer on at specific times during the day. Or I might want the device to switch off mobile data when I connect to specific WiFi access points. Currently, all we have is the very limited Do Not Disturb feature – but that’s a one-size-fits-all solution. You can set the phone to turn off the ringer for a specified time interval every day, but you can’t even customize that to further, for instance, to be able to turn off the ringer at a different time each day. Or, for several different time periods on a given day.

So what are we likely to see this year? That, I don’t know. But given the way Apple has been moving – the introduction of auto layout, and then the refinements to auto layout a year later etc, it looks very much as if Apple is working from a set playbook. They have a plan and they are steadily ticking the boxes in getting their plan in place. So, it looks very much as if larger screens (or at least screens with different resolutions/sizes) might be on the cards. But will they reveal anything this year that further cements moves in this direction?

And what about gaming? Apple seemed to be giving a nod to 2D game developers by introducing SpriteKit last year. But SpriteKit is a bit limited in what it can do. Sure, it can be used to create 2D games easily – but it still has some rough edges. Will Apple be polishing out these rough edges this year? Or will it simply let SpriteKit languish in the same state it was in when it was first introduced?

So many questions! Hopefully, at least some will be answered soon 🙂