Last week, I attended the WWDC 2024 event in Cupertino. It took place in both the original Infinite Loop campus, as well as the Apple Park “spaceship” campus which opened in 2017 and cost $5 billion to build. Apple’s WWDC events are no longer a traditional developer conference. The developer session videos are all uploaded for free, and even the keynote is a prerecorded, so event attendees see it at the same time as the rest of the world. Instead, this is more of a social event – an opportunity to meet fellow developers, bump into some famous people, and take advantage of Apple’s hospitality. I found the event uplifting and exciting, and I was able to talk with many people and share perspectives with them. 

Inside the Infinite Loop campus – rumors of a free bar may or may not be greatly exaggerated

The event was a great opportunity to share ideas and plans with other developers

Now, you might think that the event is solely for Swift developers, but this is not entirely true. Of course, Apple are constantly pitching their chosen language and frameworks at the event, but there is also a recognition that many people develop software for Apple platforms in tools other than Swift and Xcode. Of the people I spoke to, quite a number of people were using something other than Swift (including an Apple engineer!). Many of the sessions from WWDC are naturally catered towards Swift developers, but there are still some that will be useful to Xojo developers. I’ve highlighted a selection of videos below, along with my own description.

I want more stuff

When browsing WWDC videos, if you come across new functionality or an API that isn’t exposed in Xojo, the best course of action is to create a feature request at https://tracker.xojo.com. But don’t stop there. Tell the community about your request on the forum and ask them to give the request a “thumbs up” if they agree. This helps the Xojo team gauge interest. For some requests, you may also want to rope in support from me or one of the other MVPs, so that we can potentially engage with the team directly on your behalf at one of our regular meetings.

At each WWDC, Apple releases beta versions of its new tools and operating systems. These are very early versions, especially at this point in the beta cycle, and should not be installed on your main machines without very good reason. Early anecdotal evidence suggestions few problems with Sequoia (the new version of macOS) and Xojo apps, but testing such software should be done in virtual machines or on machines that you don’t use for your daily coding. When Xojo support for the new OS and the new version of Xcode becomes official, the System Requirements page will be updated at https://documentation.xojo.com/resources/system_requirements_for_current_release.html

Highlighted WWDC 2024 videos

“What’s new in App Store Connect”

Take better advantage of the App Store, get your app nominated for featuring and more.

“Add personality to your app through UX writing”

This is a quintessentially Apple presentation, but it may be thought provoking. What is the tone of your app? Does it matter for your market?

“Implement App Store Offers”

Self-explanatory from the title. Most of this will require the use of MBS plugins.

“Platforms State of the Union 5-Minute Recap”

The full State of the Union presentation, which follows the main keynote each WWDC, is rather lengthy and not required viewing for Xojo developers. But the five minute recap is worth watching to get an overview.

“Build multilingual-ready apps”

A lot of this video involves Swift code but there is still useful information for everyone in this.

Notes: 

• Apple also have a “Expanding your app to new markets” document at https://developer.apple.com/localization/. 
• To take advantage of much of this in your Xojo apps, see https://documentation.xojo.com/topics/localizing_your_apps/introduction_to_app_localization.html

“What’s new in SF Symbols 6”

SF Symbols (SF stands for San Francisco) is a library of thousands of clean and simple symbols for use in Apple platforms only. Apple typically updates this yearly.

Notes:

• To take advantage of SF Symbols in your iOS apps, use the Picture.SystemImage method. See the docs at https://documentation.xojo.com/api/graphics/picture.html#picture-systemimage
• There is no built-in support for SF Symbols in Xojo Mac apps, but you can still take advantage of them. See this blog post for details: https://blog.xojo.com/2021/10/21/quicktip-using-sf-symbols-in-macos-revisited/
• Tell Xojo that this support should really be built-in! Lend your support to this case; https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/60751
• Whilst SF Symbols is Apple-only, there is also a library of images built into Xojo for Android developments, also using the Picture.SystemImage method.
• Browse SF Symbols on your Mac (and get their names for use in Xojo) by downloading the SF Symbols utility from https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/

More videos

Want to watch even more videos? (Shouldn’t you be coding?) Subscribe to the official Xojo YouTube channel and also see videos from the recent Monkeybread Software conference, including presentations from Xojo engineers and other MVPs. https://www.youtube.com/@MonkeybreadSoftware/videos

Gavin is a Xojo MVP and is based in the UK. He has been a Xojo developer since the first version in 1998.

Download mp3 or watch on Xojo’s YouTube Channel.

Topics include:

• Photo Tape
• TRAnimation Library
• TRCustomListBox
• WWDC

^{Heavy Action by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artist: http://audionautix.com/}

There’s a lot of neat new features coming in iOS 16. The kinds of customizations Apple is adding to the Lock Screen are quite nice both aesthetically and practically. While I’m personally not prone to sending text messages I later regret, being able to edit messages and more importantly unsend them, is going to save many relationships. That you can easily switch between dictation and the keyboard means I will probably use dictation a lot more than I have in the past. I have a friend that uses it constantly and I can’t tell you how many times a second text message arrives to explain the incomprehensible message that had arrived moments earlier. That it now adds punctuation will make me want to use it more as dictating punctuation has always felt awkward to me. It will however likely infuriate my kids who think punctuation in text messages is rude. That ApplePay is going to have integrated order tracking is really nice. I have been using an app for that and sadly quite recently several of the companies it allows you to track have dramatically reduced the functionality of their APIs making the app almost useless. That you will be able to easily share photos amongst family members via an iCloud Shared Photo Library is a feature my family will definitely be using. It’s very cool that you can have it automatically share photos that were taken when family members were close by or when they are in the photo itself. It’s a very nice use of Apple Neural Engine.

That Apple announcing a feature to help people escaping abuse says a lot about what they value and how important privacy is to one’s personal safety. It goes right along with features they have added in the past that allow you to reach into your pocket and dial 911 should you need to do that in secret. I’m big into making my home smarter so I was happy to see the Home app getting a facelift as well as Apple working with other companies on smart home interoperability. I’m also a huge fan of CarPlay and seeing Apple’s vision for it becoming nearly the entire way in which you interact with displays and controls in your car and being able to customize that to your liking was far more than I had ever thought would happen. That future is clearly years away because it requires a lot of cooperation with the automakers but as they adopt it, it will certainly sway my future car purchases.

I wear an Apple Watch and very much care about the quality of my sleep. That they have added the ability to see your REM, core and deep sleep cycles is very cool. I will definitely be wearing my watch to bed more often as a result. They are adding a medication reminder system which I can see as being a benefit. I only take one pill a day so it’s not something I would use but my wife takes several and on her busy days sometimes forgets to take them so it’s a feature she will definitely use.

The M2 was something I was fully expecting and it’s nice to see it incrementally getting better. Apple made it clear that performance per watt is the key metric for them and that makes a lot of sense. We need that kind of metric in many other places in society so that we better understand the impact we are having on each other and our planet.

The surprise feature in macOS Ventura was Stage Manager. it makes it easy to avoid the clutter of having a lot of windows open. I wasn’t expecting it and yet I’m sure I will use it. Like Messages, Mail is getting an unsend feature and lots of other nice improvements especially to search (which has always felt weak to me) but I’ll have to test it to know just how much it has improved. Passkeys is Apple’s name for their implementation of the Fido standard they are collaborating on with Google and Microsoft. It’s designed to get rid of passwords entirely, something of which I will definitely be an early adopter. They really have thought that one through. It will make all of our devices and data far more secure. Being able to use FaceTime with Handoff will be really nice. I’ve been on a FaceTime call and then hung up to call someone back from my Mac so it will be nice to be able to just transfer it from one device to another.

The new MacBook Air is a nice incremental upgrade. If you have an Intel-based MacBook Air, this is a good time to upgrade.

iPadOS 16 is bringing some more desktop-like features to iPad. Things like standard ways for accessing documents, renaming them, collaboration, etc., all make iPad feel a little more like a desktop without it being a desktop. It feels like Apple is striking the right balance. They also previewed a new app called Freeform which is essentially a digital whiteboard that you can use to collaborate with others. Though now that I say that, it seems to not really do it justice given that you can share so many different things in a common space, from text, drawings, photos, video and more. It would be great for brainstorming with a remote team.

Overall, this keynote demonstrated a lot of incremental improvements across the software side of the product line and that’s a good thing. We all want something big, new and flashy but those often come at the cost of a lot fewer incremental improvements. I’m actually quite happy that we weren’t blindsided by something that could potentially change our short term plans here at Xojo. I look forward to using many of the new features they are adding this year.

Join Xojo on Zoom today at 1pm to 3pm Eastern (10am to 12pm Pacific).

See you online!

As a user of several of Apple’s technologies, I’ll share what I personally found cool from today’s keynote:

1. Amazon Prime for Apple TV – A few months ago I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Amazon Prime. I did it primarily because it made sense from a cost-saving point of view but knowing that I’d get access to Amazon Prime Video made it more appealing. Unfortunately, Prime Video isn’t compatible with Apple TV. I  primarily watch TV via my actual television and Apple TV so I was pleased to hear that Amazon Prime Video is coming to Apple TV later this year. Alyssa tells me that the user experience for Amazon Prime Video is pretty awful on most other platforms so having the Apple TV user experience along with Amazon Prime Video sounds like a great combination.
2. macOS High Sierra – For the next major release of macOS Apple is primarily focusing on improving their existing OS rather than filling it with lots of features. They didn’t specifically mention increasing stability but I’m sure that’s part of the agenda. There are, however, some new features that are noteworthy.
   1. Safari – The Apple browser has been made significantly faster, apparently far faster than Chrome and other browsers in Apple’s tests. It also now has auto-play blocking which is going to be my new favorite Safari feature as it will block websites from automatically playing audio and video when the page loads. That’s annoying so I’m glad Apple is doing something about it.
   2.  Spotlight for Mail – Searching Mail nows uses Spotlight which appears to do a better job of finding what you’re looking for.
   3. Apple File System – The file system of macOS is HFS which is 30 years old now. Apple’s new file system (AFS), already in use for iOS, is coming to macOS. It will provide better encryption, crash protection and more. It’s time for an update and the transition on iOS went incredibly smoothly.
   4. iMac Pro – Apple has designed a new iMac just for Pro users with some pretty crazy possible configurations. For example, the processor starts at 8 cores but you can get up 18 cores. The Radeon graphics card can do 11 teraflops. It comes with 10Gb ethernet. Given that the Mac Pro was noticeably absent, I’m wondering if this iMac Pro is aimed at the Mac Pro crowd.
3. Messages in iCloud – Your Messages content is synced across all devices. Delete a conversation on one device and it’s deleted on the others.
4. Person-to-Person Apple Pay Payments – Being able to send someone money directly right through Messages sounds really great. It was not clear how it works if the other party doesn’t have an iOS device. It sounds like Apple will have its own debit card so perhaps that’s how it will work for others. We will see.
5. New Siri voices – The voice of Siri is pretty good but Apple has made it significantly better in iOS 11. It sounds extremely natural. They only did a short demo but it almost sounds like it would be hard to tell that it’s not a real person. This is something we will be facing over the coming years: the inability to tell if we are interacting with a bot or a real person.
6. Apple Maps – They are adding mall and airport maps which is great. For driving, they’ve added speed limit notification and lane guidance, two big improvements. They’ve also added a “Do Not Disturb While Driving” option which will sense when you are driving and turn off notifications so they don’t distract you.
7. New Machine Learning APIs – Apple has been investing a lot in machine learning and they are starting to make those APIs available to developers. Coming in iOS 11 are APIs for face detection and tracking as well as natural language processing.
8. New iPad and iOS 11 Features – Another incremental improvement for the iPad Pro, but more importantly some new iOS 11 features specific to the iPad. The dock works more like the one in macOS in that you can use it for app switching. They’ve added drag and drop and a new Files app which gives you Finder-like file access. This is great news as I’m planning to switch my parents from a Mac to iPads later this year.
9. HomePod – The rumors said this was coming and here it is. As suspected, it’s not just a speaker that has built-in Siri. Apple has designed it to provide stellar audio that hooks into Apple Music (and presumably your iPhone’s music collection as well) and uses Siri to not just interact but also let you set reminders, alarms, send text messages and more. HomePod detects the shape of the room then optimizes the audio for the room. If you buy two of them, they detect each other and work together to provide even better audio. I think this is something I’ll just have to hear for myself and I’m really curious if the Siri connectivity can handle multiple users.

There was a lot more covered in the keynote, but these 9 things stood out to me and are what I am personally looking forward to using.