Thank you to Apple for doing a developer conference that kept almost everyone to the end. I am used to go to large enterprise conferences, and usually by day 3 or 4 the crowds really thin out. Today was day 5, and the lunch session today was PACKED! The room held 3,000 people, and the break out sessions both before and after probably held over 1,000 people and were full too.
WWDC was 6,000 developers from around the globe and there were only about 4 major sessions at any given time, plus labs. The labs were designed to get you one on one time with engineers, designers, and App Store admins; while the sessions hit the key capabilities that Apple wants developers to focus on over the next year. What was really cool was that every session also pointed you back to prior year WWDC sessions for more information. This let’s you build up your knowledge across the multiple WWDC sessions.
Today was a set of sessions that really helped round out my understanding of key technologies. First was a session on using Collection Effectively. Collections are language constructs, Arrays, Dictionaries, etc. that conform to a set of basic methods, allowing you to get to various entries. The key thing I learned was that you can’t take for granted that [0] is always the first element. Nor can you assume +1 will advance you to the second element in the collection.
Next I went to a session on designing notifications. While I don’t really do notifications in my apps, I may want to one day. Apple has done a lot in iOS12 to allow you to better group and respond to notifications, in a much better way. This session gave you tips and tricks so that your notifications are more meaningful, engaging and relevant. One thing that you will see soon, is the practice of giving you a Silent notification, that just shows up in Notification Center, and then allows you to decide if it is worth while. If not, as a user you can kill them easily for that app. And once you say NO, the app can’t bug you again… Nice!
One thing that has happened with my new app that I am working on is that on iOS12 it crashes on my iPhone when trying to take a picture. It didn’t crash on the iPad, and the logs that I got from TestFlight didn’t really make sense. The session on understanding Crashes and Crash logs was amazing! Mid-way thru the session I was going deep into the crash log, identifying the issue, and fixing my app. I posted a new version to TestFlight for my testers. Can’t wait to learn more here!
I had planned on going to the Lab to talk to the team about my Crash log, but since I had gone to the session, I was able to go to the lunch talk. The talk was from the Director of Lighting at Pixar. She took us through how the build the world of the dead in the movie Coco, and how she came to work at Pixar. No pictures or recordings were allowed… but if you want to see her first job at Pixar, go back and watch Monster’s Inc. Look for the leaves waving in the background of one of the nightmare scenes in a kids bedroom. See if you can focus on it. I’ve been into ray-tracing since 1985, when I saw a picture of train on a track done via 24 hours of computation of a “super-computer”. We now do that at animation speeds (30-60 frames a second) on our iPhones. This talk was inspiring and engaging.
The last two sessions of WWDC that I went to, had to do with adding delight to your apps (via performance items) and addressing Apps regardless of the size of the display (via UIKit changes). I’ve not fully gone thru my notes on them, but both sessions were really well attended and had nuggets that I am going to use in future apps of mine.
Overall, WWDC has been a great experience and I am so glad to have finally made it. I hope I can come again. See ya next year???