The hits keep coming on Day 3 of the WWDC material. Today was a little lighter on Group Labs, but I was able to get a question in on the visionOS group lab. I finally made it through all the “What’s new” sessions I had wanted to go through.
A quick rundown of the sessions with information I have captured that may be of interest:
- What’s new in Wallet – two major enhancements in my mind. The updates to the Boarding Passes seem great (evolutionary but great) having more information in one place when flying into a new city will be helpful as I’ve taken a new job. The ability to store US passport information will be helpful for those people who have not upgraded to RealID; however, since it won’t be usable overseas, and you will still need to carry your passport, this one may be much less impactful.
- What’s new in Passkeys – The industry is really pushing hard to get everyone onto passkeys. Apple has provided a vision on how this will happen. While I really like using passkeys; my wife does not. She doesn’t have a smart phone (by choice) and doesn’t like/use Apple products. So this migration to passkeys will be much much slower in our house.
- What’s new in RealityKit – I had not thought about using RealityKit in Mac apps. The new features are now supported not only on macOS but also on tvOS. To me this is the most telling message that Apple is trying to get more serious about gaming. The Anchoring updates to improve attachments, the natural object manipulation APIs, and improvements in scene handling, all should make gaming and XR easier for developers.
- What’s new in SF Symbols 7 – I pretty much only use SF Symbols to find iconography for my apps, but the new version enables some pretty powerful features including building your own draw paths and using symbols as progress indicators. May have to reassess my usage.
- What’s new in Spatial Web – Apple has made major progress in trying to open up and make their approach for spatial computing part of the W3C standard. A proposal for adding a <model/> tag to the html spec is in the works, and this session show how easy it is to extend your website to support 3D content.
- What’s new in StoreKit and In-App purchases – I’ve been working on my first app with an in-app subscription model, so this session was very interesting to me. I don’t fully understand it, but I am seeing how Apple is enabling a ton of new business models to improve the stickiness and ease of purchase for developers and consumers. The one item that worried me a bit about the newer features was the ability to make consumables easier (think about games). The way this was presented, along with the ability to provide up to a million offer codes per quarter, had me thinking this is really about sports betting and online gambling. I guess Apple wants a piece of the action. (sigh).
- What’s new in Swift – this was a very meaty session that I will have to watch multiple times. I didn’t take notes during this first watch, as I knew it was going to be complex; however, the exciting parts were Embedded Swift, Server Swift Apps, and major simplification to the concurrency approach. The ability to declare an app single threaded by default, and then only push concurrency where specific tasks require it, will make it much easier for most developers.
- VisionOS Group Lab – I am really enjoying the group labs, and even got a question voted up in this one. Each lab consists of a moderator (who is usually a platform evangelist for the area being discusses), and 4 developer/designer/engineering manager individuals. They begin by telling us their favorite new features, which surprising on aggregate will cover all the new features. Then a set of pre defined questions will call out new features or common challenges. The team then goes through as many of the questions they can from the Slido Q&A in Webex. I got a question voted up on the best approach tot take a standard iOS app and port it to visionOS. Besides the “it just works” answer, there were a list of three key sessions to review. I plan on going to do them – Principals of Spatial Design, Design for Spatial Interfaces, and Better Together, SwiftUI and RealityKit.
- What’s new in SwiftUI – a key session for anyone developing for the Apple ecosystem. Each year they expand their vision to help make it easier for you to build cross platform applications. Key this year were how to leverage the new design “liquid glass”, improvements to the underlying frameworks driving major improvements in performance, SwiftUI’s extension to handle 3D objects, Webpages, and RichText in editors. Another session to watch multiple times.
- watchOS group Lab – I didn’t get my question voted up high enough in this one, but the session was amazing. The watchOS team has been crushing it over the last few years. One of the things I learned was that the watchOS 10 updates pretty much allowed them to be prepared for “liquid glass” in advance of this week’s updates.
I am hoping to make more progress today but have three labs I am attending. I have raised multiple feedback reports (aka bugs) in the last 24 hours. The biggest right now is that my iPad running visionOS 26 has become very unstable with its networking. Given how much I use my iPad and much I am enjoying the updates they released; I hope this gets resolved quickly.
Have a great #WWDC!