Well, the team at the install lab were awesome. I wish I had left the machine alone when it went belly up, for multiple reasons. One, I would have spent most of Monday night getting frustrated, I wouldn’t have lost any data, and I would have given them a problem to debug. Instead, I got a rebuild of my machine, with the full install of the beta. I was able to finish setting up the machine, install all my data from iCloud backups, etc. I was then able to update my iPad and iPhone, and reconnect my Watch to the iPhone. So by about 10:45 this morning everything was updated as it should be.

I then got into the 11 o’clock session on Building your first SwiftUI application. Unfortunately my machine was still installing all my data, so I wasn’t able to follow along, however, it became clear to me that this will be the replacement for RXSwift. This realization will play out thru many other sessions during the day.

A few cool things about SwiftUI: it is the new UI framework that is for Swift, built in Swift. It allows for connecting up your data, (this is done by making it “Identifiable”, as such, when things in data change or in the UI, the other is updated. When working in SwiftUI, you are working simultaneously in code or in a simulator like environment. This looks amazing, and I can’t wait to update WastedTime to use this framework. Doing so will simplify the code a lot and also will allow me to remove an external framework.

I spent lunch talking with people and working thru more updates on my machines and helped a few other people go thru some of the same problems I did.

At 2pm, I went to the session on updating an iPad app for the Mac. I was so excited for this one and had fired up a copy of WastedTime to test it out. At the simplest, you just flip a bit in Xcode and build the app for Mac. Well, since I am using RXSwift, Xcode tried to recompile it for the Mac, and it failed. It is using many old APIs that are no longer supported. So I will have to update to SwiftUI before this will work. I am looking forward to making this work. It will be one of my summer projects. Given I just added RXSwift in the last year, removing it shouldn’t be too hard (I hope).

The next session was on creating an independent watch App. A few years ago, I tried to add Watch support to Wasted Time. I ultimately gave up on it, after realizing that WatchOS really wasn’t ready. Now I think it, and by it – I mean I am ready. SwiftUI will make the UI much easier to develop, my updates to WastedTime to use a more realistic object model, and better understanding of the whole platform will make this so much more easier.

The last session I went to was about Reality Kit and Reality Composer.

Reality Kit expands AR Kit to have even more realistic lighting, physics, and scenes. The amount of code you need to enable RealityKit apps is pretty minimal, if you use the right tools to build the packages. The number of things that Apple has done to make the models and scenes more realistic is pretty amazing. I am always fascinated by AR, and in my day job I believe that AR is critical for Internet of Things. My basic belief is that AR and Voice are THE new UI for the future. In this session there was no discussion of SwiftUI.

I ended up skipping the 5pm session because I got an appointment to go check out the new Mac Pro.

The area was setup with multiple work stations showing all the ways you can use the new Mac Pro. The highest machine in the demo area had a 28 core CPU and was doing studio level image rendering at basically real-time. Final rendering, would still be 15 minutes per image, verses 22 hours that many studios use right now. Amazing!

I took some videos and when I hope to put that together into a little showcase.