The best advice I was given by people who have been at WWDC before was to focus on getting time with the engineers. All the sessions are streamed as videos, and you can spend time later to watch the ones you missed. This is excellent advice!
I stared the day yesterday with getting with the AutoLayout engineers. I’ve been working on a new app, and having issues laying out a simple address input screen. I got in to the engineers and was the 10th or so person to get to talk to the engineers. The guy I got assigned to was really good at addressing asset catalogs, and tried to help me. He helped me with getting the City, State, ZIP line addressed correctly. I took his advice and went to a development area and started working on my app. I wasn’t able to get a lot more fixed in AutoLayout, and wanted to hit a few more sessions. I did get some design advice on moving some of my buttons up to the navigation bar.
I then went and sat thru a session called “I have this idea for an App”. The session was a simple getting started session, which talked you thru how to create a simple game. They did a good job of explaining the basics of xCode, interface builder, and even a bit on UITableView. The best part of the session was the list of other sessions you may want to watch to go deeper on other topics.
I made it down to lunch, which I wasn’t able to do on Monday, and sat down next to a pair of developers from Romania. We started talking, and I discussed the issues I was having with AutoLayout. The eyes light up on one of their faces and we spent the next 90 minutes or so, working thru the issues I was having with one of my screens in my new app. It was amazing! He had a great understanding of AutoLayout and of Interface Builder, He spent time explaining the concepts, and why you would do certain things. By the end of lunch the screen was perfect! I decided I was going to find time later in the day and fix the rest of the app. (Btw, now my images resize to fill the remainder of the screen).
The afternoon was filled with sessions, I went to the session on Create ML – Apple’s new machine learning engine which builds models based on data ingestion. It was amazingly fast and build much smaller models for your apps. While I’ve not done much work in my apps using ML, I am interested in seeing how this helps iOS and Mac Apps improve their prediction models. The next session was what is new in WatchOS 5. This session was interesting, not in what it said, but in what it implied. They didn’t mention in the session that Series 0 watches will not support WatchOS 5 but I read that later in the day. But this has to be because of all the new Siri functions that are coming to the Watch. Apps will be able to surface their own shortcuts and intents on WatchOS even if the app doesn’t run on the watch. We are going to get much better integration of ML and Siri. That led me to the final session I went to in the afternoon: How to create your own Siri Shortcuts. This was great! Last summer I tried to add Siri to my Wasted Time app, with the idea of simply allowing someone to say – “Start a meeting” and launch my App. Now I can do it, but the likelihood of it showing up automatically for people is going to be pretty light.
Shortcuts and Intents are registered by an app, and every time you do certain functions in your app you “donate” this knowledge to the OS. This allows Siri to “learn” pattern and ultimately predict for a user that it may be something they want to do. The most interesting part was that Apple did show how you can “unlearn” or delete the learned data. The number of developers who left during this topic was interesting. I wonder if GDPR will get them to pay attention next year!
I grabbed a pizza on the way back to my room and then spent the evening relaxing. Today’s going to great…