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What a fantastic WWDC! This is my first time in San Jose so it's been really interesting to see how different things are here compared to San Francisco. From my perspective, I love it! The show and all the surrounding activities fit so much better here and I feel like I've run into many more people just because the scale of everything is a little smaller. Oh and the scooters are πŸ’―πŸ’―πŸ’―!

Talking of running into people, thank you so much if you came up and talked with me this week! If you're still here I'll be around all day today so please do feel free to stop me if you see me. Also, be careful or I'll sneak into your photos! πŸ˜‚

So, on to the announcements. I've spoken to several people who expressed disappointment about the lack of a "wow" feature on stage (although I'd say Siri Shortcuts pretty much counted as wow for me), but I really don't see it that way. What we did get was a whole load of smaller features and refinements and nothing that should distract us too far from spending the next 12 months building amazing apps.

I won't name specific technologies, but think back to previous years where a huge new "wow" feature or a new type of app was introduced. We then spend the next 3-9 months furiously implementing them, only to find out that it didn't really bring any more success or revenue in the long run. I feel like this year Apple is saying "You've got great tools and APIs to make apps, we'll concentrate on making the core operating system better, you go do the same for your apps". I like that, and you'll be grateful of it when the new, paradigm shifting, Metal rendered, holographic UI framework requires us to re-implement everything next year. πŸ˜‚

Of course, I also want to talk about Marzipan but before I do I want to give a little advice to Apple. If you don’t give UIKit on macOS a name, quickly it’s going to get called Marzipan for the rest of time. It may already be too late! πŸ˜€

I've seen some confusion around Craig's use of the big NO slide that iOS and macOS are not merging, and then previewing UIKit apps running on macOS. To me, this makes perfect sense and it's how I always hoped it would be done. Let's bring some of the tools and techniques to macOS that we've been enjoying on iOS. This is UIKit, but it's not iOS. I'm also glad to see enhancements to AppKit at the same time. This is not (yet?) a replacement, but a compliment. I like it. It's also a really great sign that this is being used internally.

Wrapping up, I can't skip the improvements to Xcode. Again, there's nothing revolutionary here but there are some great smaller changes and the source control change bar is especially impressive.

I also can't finish this without raising a glass to "Bug fixes and other improvements" which will no longer pass for release notes unless that is only what the release contained. This'll cause problems for some (larger) companies, but will be better for users. Here's to you, useless release notes! 🍷

But Dave, what about all the other stuff from this week? What about the new App Store Guidelines, the Swift 5 delay, ARKit 2.0 or the oodles of ML related announcements and improvements, or the fact that iTunes Connect is being rebranded to App Store Connect and now has an official API and TestFlight invite links! 😱 Yes, there's a lot I didn't talk about up here and you won't find coverage of these things down below either. However, we have 3 months to cover everything important before the official releases. There's still time... πŸ‘

What a week, I love this event and this community.

Dave Verwer  

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