WWDC is designed for developers, and this year’s keynote didn’t miss. I arrived shortly after 6 am, and ended up pretty far back in the queue, but as always, Apple does a great job of moving every one thru. The four hour wait didn’t seem as along, and the discussions in the queue were fun and enlightening.
I ended up with people from China, Romania, UK and other locations. Like last year, most of them were developers from big companies. The jackets from Sunday were able to be turned inside out, with all of them having random colors. I have seen Red, Blue, Orange, and Black. I hope there are at least 2 other colors – shout out to six colors!
Mine is blue, and even though it is pretty cool temperature wise in San Jose, the material is dense enough – so I didn’t wear it all day. Hope I can get a few days that I can wear it at home.
We turned and got into the building around 7:30 and had large breakfast. Here I was talking to developers from Japan, UK, Jamaica, and US. One guy was a Facebook developer, and we discussed that I removed Facebook support from one of my apps due to the level of data I was getting in the Analytics. Way way too much data.
After making it in and having an amazing keynote I was sitting far enough in the back to be able to grab a bio break – this next picture shows you a view you don’t see in the keynote stream! TONS of developers enjoying themselves.
I was able to get a seat on an isle so that made it easier to get up and around if needed.
So let’s get to what I was most excited about. First and foremost, WOW the Mac Pro is amazing, the monitor is crazy beautiful, and in true apple form, I won’t be buying this one. It is designed for true pros, and I don’t need all of this, nor can I afford it.
Catalyst (Aka Marzipan) looks really incredible. The biggest thing in it is the same thing that is making tons of things possible – SWIFTUI. This is going to make it possible to really do really dynamic UIs and do so that really appears to be device independent. Now let’s see if my vision comes true. I plan on rebuilding my Wasted Time app with SwiftUI and Catalyst. And my new app I’ve been working on, will be build with SwiftUI too. So excited.
Other things that were cool – Multi-User support on tvOS, and HomePod. Hearing App on the Watch. Stand alone Watch Apps and AppStore. Map updates. IPadOS. HomeKit Secure Video , HomeKit Routers, CarPlay Updates, USB Support on iPad! And Major updates to ARKit in clouding Reality Composer and RealityKit.
Now on to to the woe.
During the lunch break, I successfully downloaded all the betas, etc. and tried to update the iPad first. This failed over and over, saying it needed to install software. I assumed this was going to need macOS Catalina, so I kicked off the install. Everything seemed to go well, until the final reboot. It hung
After 20-30 minutes, I rebooted. The boot up looked good until I went to log in, and it hung (at roughly the same place). I tried to install again. No go. I tried to rollback to mirror OS. This appeared to go Ok, but then asked me for a disk drive password. nothing worked. Not login (which I had to use to unlock the disk to do the downgrade), not iCloud, nothing. After a few tries, I went into disk until and saw the the upgrade had created two drive. One for the OS, and one for Data.
A key announcement for Catalina was they were isolating the OS and putting it on a read only partition. So this made sense. I decided that to fix the upgrade. I would delete the OS only partition. So now I was really hosed. I then took and went back to the hotel, booted to recovery mode, went to a terminal window and tried to copy as much of my data of the drive as I could. Putting is on an external 500GB drive I brought with. It of course, ran out of room.
So now I have just erased the entire 2TB drive, and am in the process of installing macOS Sierra (clean). When it is done, I will do an upgrade to Catalina. We will see how we go from there. Wish me luck!