WWDC Keynote with special guest Donny Wals

Jeroen Leenarts: So Hi, and welcome to the 32nd episode of my podcast. I'm sitting here with a special guest today, Donnie wells. Hi, Donny. Hello. So we just watched the apple keynotes the WWDC keynote. And we're still processing what's been announced in the past two hours. So we're just going to take it slow. We have some new cyber today, we of course have done is Monday morning tweets. And we'll just see where we'll end up. today. I'm not going to do the usual intro, because we're probably going to need a lot of time to get through everything. So Donnie, what is your first impression thus far of the keynote? Unknown: I guess it's pretty much what I was hoping for and expecting. The normal usual suspects, I was updates, everything updated, everything knew there wasn't anything big this year, which I also was sort of not thinking they would do anything huge, I think, probably swift concurrency and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's what they want to focus on this year. And also swift UI, of course, you're gonna get a ton of improvements and all that. But I don't think I saw a ton of new API's for developers to tie into to so they mostly focused on what the OS can do. Now, I'm sure that we as developers get to tie into that a little bit. And I was mostly impressed. I'm really curious to try the the whole magic. Was it called universal control? Jeroen Leenarts: I think it I think it was, yeah, that was pretty cool. My initial impression was that it was indeed, as usual with keynote, a lot of consumer focused content, so announcing what's going to be new in the in the second half of the year for all the platforms. And they again, had a somewhat of a different introduction, with the keynote, with some developers coming up with ways that how the event should be open. So they actually said, we asked developers to come up with an opening video, and several developers pitching ideas for how it should be opened. So what was your thoughts on that? Unknown: I thought was funny. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, it's, it's the it's the usual weirdness that Apple were to start to do at the beginning of an event, I guess. Unknown: I did, openings are always well executed, but a little bit quirky. I like it. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, the like, with the audience of all these emojis sitting there. And what I noticed is that there was not that much content about how Apple as a company was doing, I remember in previous years, they spend a lot more time on, on how Apple was doing, what the numbers were, how things are going really, and and they just didn't they just, they just dove right in with with iOS at the start with with crack. So I was 15 is the thing that they they started with. And one of the biggest things I think that they announced was this whole focus thing that they were going on about still not sure what it's about what it's going to do if it's going to be useful in my use case, but it is, it is again, a lot more of machine learning and, and dynamic stuff that that the platform is going to do for you to make sure that you probably do the things that you're supposed to be doing at that time today. So and as you already mentioned, in the in the pre show a lot of FaceTime improvements, and that ties in perfectly with the whole year that we had, starting in 2020. Up till now, actually. So what were the biggest things in FaceTime? If you can still recall that? Unknown: Yes. So one thing I absolutely loved was that we can now share FaceTime links to non non Apple users, like Apple has with iMessage, too. And also with with FaceTime, they have pretty good tools. The software is pretty good. I love using it. But it's always a bit of a hurdle because it's not on Android, not on the web, not outside of iOS and Apple's platforms really. So being able to start the FaceTime call with somebody who is not on iOS is amazing. I hope they sort of open up the platform for non iOS people to start their own calls to like make it really cross platform. Yeah. I also think it was really cool that they added all these shared listening and watching features. That sounded really neat. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, and I also noticed that the Disney plus was very well represented and actually called by name, I think even that they were already ahead in supporting this whole new sharing feature for video. Yeah, so but that also ties in with the big news that you threw out over the past few days that you were actually venturing out on your own and not working for Disney anymore from July. So what are your thoughts on on leaving Disney and now getting these announcements? Unknown: I'm changed. I mean, I also didn't know that Disney was working on this with Apple. So it's really cool to see. So did you have any questions about like, how it works or whatever, I literally have no idea. And that's not because I'm under an NDA or whatever. It's because I really don't know. Jeroen Leenarts: That's hard for y'all. Unknown: But, ya know, leaving Disney it was a decision a long, long, long time in the making. And yeah, I just figured it's, it's time to go do my own thing venture out on my own and see where that leads me. So that's, Jeroen Leenarts: it's definitely something that we're going to dig into sometime in the second half of the year within the, with the regular interview. Sure. Yeah. So and then, and then after the whole sharing thing, they went on to two messages, but I'm personally not very much a messages user. Are you using messages a Unknown: lot? Whenever I can, yeah, pretty much exclusively. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. So what are your thoughts on what they said there? Because to me, messages is like, Yeah, whatever. Unknown: It doesn't tie in with the way that I use messages. So for me, it wasn't necessarily super exciting. Okay. Yeah. But it looks really cool. Jeroen Leenarts: And then, of course, all the photo things because photos is always a thing with Apple. And then we are at focus, the new tool for focusing? Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I'm curious to see how it'll work out. Not sure yet. What I like about if it's gonna work for my use case, but again, it's strictly consumer facing what to do here. So Unknown: yeah, this one, I think this one's gonna be super useful. Like, oftentimes, I will want to sort of mute specific apps or whatever, and not my whole phone per se, or specific people like you. Jeroen Leenarts: Were recording, right? Sorry. Yeah. No. Unknown: So you know, like, sometimes it's just you want to get stuff done, or not even necessarily get stuff done. But like, it would be nice if I could, like mute some group chats while I'm working. And then in the afternoon, mute some work people or you know, people that I talk to during work or, you know, just sort of tailor my incoming notifications for part of the day without having to mute everything all at once. Yeah. Also, one thing that I've kind of missed always with messages is like, Do Not Disturb allows, for example, my wife to call me and it'll immediately go to voicemail. And it'll be like a ring because she is in my favorites list. But messages doesn't have such a thing, even though often, I would like certain people to be able to message me even if I have to not disturb turned on. Yeah, so I feel like this will help tweak and tailor that experience. Cool. Very interesting. Jeroen Leenarts: Yes. And then, after the whole mesh, just thing, they went into wallet. And they're adding a lot of new key types, really. So not only can you unlock your car, apparently also your home and local hotels. But yeah, this is one of the things it's gonna take like one or maybe two years before, it's gonna be of interest, where I live, so in the Netherlands, and it's always takes a while for these things to trickle through to our part of the world. And so yeah, it's just something interesting, but especially the getting your ID in your phone in certain states in the US, that was like a bit surprising to me. And then, of course, there's the usual bunch of map updates. So I liked the way that they could actually scan your surroundings and then just give a clear, augmented reality improvement to indicate where you needed to go. Unknown: Yeah, amazing. Jeroen Leenarts: And I do wonder with, with the whole find my stuff, that's what the, with the airports they, they seem to be like, part of the Find my network, but does it also, it doesn't include the regular airports, I think only the Pro and the maxar versions. So curious to find out how that works. Because it would be great to be able to just find my airports anywhere in the world, because so already lost like two, two sets of those. It's a bit of a bummer. So yeah, we'll just see how that works out. And then after iOS, of course, there was the iPad iOS, and I think the biggest news there was that you could put which it's like everywhere, in all kinds of interesting sizes. And there was also a new which its size, it seems that they showcased. So that's going to be like the biggest thing for us developers that you have to support yet another format for widgets, but that's the Unknown: first segment in there like with the widgets and the multitasking. Those feature that should have been there all along with the limitation of widgets in the control center was very arbitrary in my opinion, and not having to add library on iPad also seemed a little bit weird. And then multitasking has always been a little bit finicky. So I hope that's much better now that they've done several attempts of getting it right Jeroen Leenarts: now. Yeah, and then, of course, the usual set of improvements for people using an Apple pencil. And then the big news, I think, for iPad OS, that's Swift Playgrounds, not much known yet at this moment. But they specifically said that it would add the ability to build apps on iPad. But I wonder if it's like full blown apps or whether or not it's going to be like some sort of an app that is like, embedded within sort of playgrounds type thing. But hearing that also announced Xcode clouds, maybe that ties in together so that you can just, I don't know, develop on your iPads and get something out there. Even Unknown: they did say that you could ship to the app store from your iPad. So that's definitely interesting. Yeah, added, to what extent you can, like have your projects on the Mac, and then transferred from the Mac back to iPad and stuff, because they were very explicit about it being swift UI, for Jeroen Leenarts: example. However, they did, say, build apps on iPads. So to me that could be that could mean two things that you can just build apps on iPad, you know, like any regular app targeted any platform, or maybe just app specifically for an iPad. So not Unknown: really mentioned also the iPhone. Definitely going to have iOS for sure. Jeroen Leenarts: Cool. Yeah, but that's definitely something we have to try out with the device, when we have Unknown: rough edges and limitations will be for that one. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. And then there was this whole slew of of privacy improvements. That's what we're talking about. So that's the whole meal privacy protection, and the safari tracking and IP address hiding and location hiding, and actually indicating what apps are using, what data from your device and how often and I'm really curious to see what apps on my phone actually are grabbing, while I'm not looking and actually not using their device. So what do you expect with this new feature? Unknown: Well, I think few apps are probably scared. Jeroen Leenarts: Feature buried. Yeah, what do you think they're gonna start a lawsuit? Unknown: I don't know. This is for sure. Not strengthening whatever relationship Apple and Facebook and similar companies had. Yeah. But as a user, I like this. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, not sure yet. What I like about it. I like the new Siri voice that's also showcased a little bit, because it's it had some sort of accent, I couldn't really put down what kind of accent it was. But who knows. And of course, as Apple always says, The audio is not leaving their device. So yeah, so a lot of opera on device processing happening with, with Siri probably gonna learn a bit more about that as well, because there was not a big section really, with Siri, what was going on there. And then iCloud was the next topic with digital legacy. So that's basically what I took away from that was that if you if you died, then somebody can get your data if you allowed it while you're still living. So, yeah, okay. It's typically a typical Apple to think about that, I think, but it's, it's useful. So I Unknown: know, a lot of people probably have passwords in one pass and that kind of stuff. LastPass you could share it, but this is it's nice. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. Yeah. And the whole private browsing the private relay thing. I'm not sure if that's also including Apple Mail, but it is all included with iCloud. It seems so and it was it they said that it was just part of your iCloud subscription if you're a paid user of iCloud, I think. So. That's really cool, because I do wonder how much traction private relay will get if people will actually start using basically VPN more in Safari. But we'll see. Just a lot of Yeah, just a lot of privacy focused feature features really coming in iOS 15. And one thing that I noticed is that of all the small sections, you know, the that I cut out from one of the headline speakers like crack and Tim, is that a lot of those smaller sub sections they were they were done by a woman I noticed. Did you see that as well? Yeah, I love I love the representation. Really good today. Try to showcase all the different people that you have within the company. So yeah, of course a lot of health going on. So sharing your health data which your mom? Not sure if that's a good idea. But yeah, some people might like that you should Unknown: be able to prove that you've been eating well, and exercising and all that. Right. That's what moms always worry about. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, I do use a little bit of Apple Health, but not as, not as much as a lot of other people are actually doing. Unknown: Yeah, these keynotes always remind me how little apple stuff I actually Jeroen Leenarts: saved for me. Yeah. And I jokingly actually said on Twitter at some point that Apple should like launch the apple doorbell. But well, they're not launching it as a product, but they're doing some things that is pretty darn close to that, actually. Yeah. So Unknown: speaking of doorbells, is there any good doorbell that doesn't have a camera? Because I would love that smart doorbell. But I would hate to have a camera in front of my house because I don't need one. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. And just putting some tape on that is also a bit strange, I reckon. Yeah. So they talked a lot about the the home kit improvements with the chapter that you can use your phone as your key for your house. So probably some new API coming in that regard as well. They go back to the share, play, of course, again, because now also they tie in a little bit of Apple TV. So yeah, it's it's, I don't know, it's to me, the keynotes. They've had different keynotes in other years, that was like, much more developer focused. And this was actually a keynote that was really very strongly consumer focused. And I do wonder how, how much news we're gonna get in the, in the State of the Union that's in a few hours. And yeah. And then the big news came with Mapquest. montery. But it seems a bit like that the image that tied in with this new Mapquest release was like, I don't know, was it like a marshland? Or what was it actually? Not really sure, because there was a lot of lakes and a lot of hills. And it all looks like really wetlands, but have to look it up on Wikipedia, what, what Monterey is, what kind of reaching it actually is. And and he actually mentioned that if you have an M one MacBook that with Safari, you can now reach up to 17 hours of browsing. And I do wonder what that would mean, for any new mobile hardware or mobile laptop part. But that's going to announce because does that mean that the the new laptops that are hopefully going to announce sometime this year, that will have the same insane amount of battery as the current line of M one MacBooks. Unknown: Who knows, I imagine it'll be maybe a little bit less, I imagine the the beefier M, one will basically be just two at once. Like we'll probably need double the power or something. Who knows, it's but it might also have a bigger batteries. Jeroen Leenarts: So I do notice that that's gonna do another push on Safari Extensions again. So that's more likely, the extension will now transfer to iPads and iPhones. So that basically means that if you write an extension, the the potential user base is much larger, because there's just a lot more people using an iPhone compared to a Mac. And I do wonder if this will be the push that Safari Extensions will need to actually become useful again, because I must say that Safari Extensions seem to have like, died out a little bit over the over the last year. So not a lot of new developments going on there. And, yeah, I do hope that is something that that's going to give him another push to this feature, because there have been great Safari Extensions. So over the years, and and then there are the go to developer technologies. And that's really the part that is of interest to us. Now, of course, they announced the new features that are available in Swift 5.5 With all the new concurrency features, it's still up for debate whether or not that's a language feature that we're going to be using a lot. Because, yeah, with Swift concurrency and all the language features, I do wonder if it's a feature that that people will initially start overusing will we'll have to see. And yeah, but they did announce that they made huge advances across all of their platforms. And yeah, I'm really curious in regards to the App Store, what they're doing there because they also announced the the Xcode clouds thing. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to digging in to that, really, because at the project at the place where I work, we've been having some issues with releasing our code with our current CI setup, because we are tied to the latest Xcode version. That's 12.5 The hosting provider for our Xcode execution environments only delivers Xcode 12.4. And they do have 12.5 in private beta. But that's, that's a bit annoying if you're not part of the private beta pool. So we cannot deploy our code base through a regular process, we have to do it locally on on a developer machine. So yeah, what are your thoughts on that? Because they also announced testflight for the Mac, and a lot of things going on there. So what do you think Donnie? Unknown: Well, finally, we know where buddybuild went. I am super excited, I just just applied for the X cloud cloud beta. So we'll see when I get access to that, Jeroen Leenarts: and also test flights for the Mac. That's also a welcome addition, finally, about time, so and it also includes in app purchases, so that's a good thing. That's it already for the entire keynote. So good news was that all the developer betas will be available later today. And all the public betas will be available next month. And public releases sometime in the fall, I hope they don't have to delay it as much as they had last year. But we'll see. And I do wonder whether or not the State of the Union will give some more information that gives them more insight in what API's are actually new. Because I haven't had time to dig into the into the release notes just yet. That's it for the keynote, we also have our regular new section that I usually do. Within the podcast, I have a number of news items that I actually looked at this week, Josh Holtz launched a new app that was called Oh crop. So it said some very interesting product really, because it basically involves you cropping images with an emoji, but test like, and that's like a random chance that you do not get a crop with the emoji that you selected. But that emoji is actually had the poop emoji. So that's a bit silly. But it's very funny because that's also the whole monetization aspect of this product. So you can actually, you can actually buy an in app purchase called the some something called with a plunger, and then you won't have any poop emojis yet, but I think getting the poop emoji is actually part of the fun of using this app. So we'll see. Another article that I noticed was bottom Norwich cough was Bluetooth and swift UI. So he basically has been trying to write some code that would control an RGB LED strip. And that was like through Bluetooth. And he wants to do it from Swift UI, obviously, because you're writing something new. So you should be using Swift wire racket. And what's very interesting is that is basically using core Bluetooth, that's pretty much a low level, Bluetooth Bluetooth API available in the iOS platform. And I think it's available on the Mac as well. But in regards to Bluetooth, there's not much that has any lower level access to the Bluetooth radio. So you can actually pretty much define your own messages that you transfer over various Bluetooth related protocols. And what's really interesting about his article is that he basically was able in his article to create, like Bluetooth access to a random device that he had available in his house. And that he was pretty much able to from Swift UI app, access the core Bluetooth API and be able to control this device. So if you ever have to do anything with Bluetooth, this is probably a nice starting point. There's also some nice links with some apple related resources and a link to a swift UI article by Hugh Donnie, and I hope you noticed that this this article because he was linking to your content. And yeah, it's just a great write up of just doing some weird stuff with with Bluetooth from the Swift UI app. And that's, that's why I really liked that article. And then there's one that I just guess, just for the heck of it because I really like repeating Xcode keyboard shortcuts. That's the article by user loaf, a web blog by Keith Harrison. And it's, it's pretty nice overview of all kinds of things that you can actually do. Do with keyboard shortcuts with some nice? Yeah, what some nice images attached that actually point out which keyboard shortcuts actually activate specific icons in your Xcode UI. So if you're looking at something in your Xcode UI, and you're wondering, okay, how do I actually hit that button without using my mouse, there's a good chance you can find that in the article by Keith Harrison. And he also has all a whole bunch of other keyboard shortcuts this, and there's bound to be something in there that is useful for your workflow. So that's why I always like repeating these Xcode shortcut articles. And yeah, that's pretty much it for the articles I wanted to mention. And then there's, of course, your Monday morning tweet, but it's it's a bit of a different one this week, I think. So you tweeted actually, that it was WWDC Monday, and that you're ready for a week full of announcements and interesting sessions. You're asking if there's anything interesting for people. And maybe people are doing something different than following WWDC content, hour or maybe not launching something new and you ask people to actually tell you about it. And the thing I was working on was actually installing some sunscreens on some windows here because after the remodeling we noticed that was heating up in the attic here quite a lot, even while it's not that warm, actually. And yet also, again had like a lot of responses on your on your tweet, like you have every week. And also there's like the usual suspects, like poll and Phillip. And so yeah, Pawel is looking forward for some swift UI updates and Philippus. Like, really trying to silently launch a new project. But if you're trying to launch it, silence, why would you then mention it in a tweet? So he's gonna reach out through direct messages with several people, and we'll see what Phillip is up to. And Michaela Quran. What is she looking for? Yeah, she's, she's just happy with whatever is going to be announced. That's that's typical Michaela. I think because she's she's always ready to dive into new API's, it seems it are saying is has launched check later. Ah, that's like a read later law type app, it seems. Yeah. Cool. And then we have Dan aka sigh. Yeah, it's gonna be a long day. And I agree, because they're going to start at seven and then middle of the night is going to be the State of the Union. I'm not, I haven't decided yet. We're not gonna watch it live for read up next morning. Because I do have to work tomorrow. And yeah, a couple of people are launching some stuff, either through testflight for private preview, or they're actually launching something new, like boss, Brooke. Unknown: I mean, he's in the accessibility team at Apple. So you launched a bunch of things today. Jeroen Leenarts: Seems so I also noticed that the whole new weather app that no file Swift is actually involved with that part of the platform. Unknown: Yes. So we also know where Dark Sky went now. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, yeah, they were bought. And then a lot of it's actually our ended up in the in the new weather app. So that's good. So Peter Frieza, is really looking forward to again, new Swift UI features. It does seem that I noticed in your Monday tweet in the replies, people were really looking forward to new Swift UI features. Yes, but yeah, I do wonder what people consider to be new Swift UI features. Unknown: Some of that I heard a lot was first responder stuff, or at least like being able to have form on the screen pre select some text field. Also search bar support, search controller, the ability to, like remove the table separators thing from a list, which we could do in iOS 13, but no longer can and iOS 14. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, I do notice that if you're using Swift UI at the moment, there's certain aspects of the UI Kit API that are just not available on Swift UI. And then you need to make it available, basically, pretty much by yourself by lifting the the UI kits, components into some sort of Swift UI kind of wrapper. And it always feels like a bunch of work with a lot of risk involved, because that's pretty much code that I don't know the one or two years down the line, you're just gonna have to throw it out again. So that that's what kept me from using Swift UI too much on on an existing code base at the moment. Do you do you Use a lot of Swift UI already in in development that you're currently doing or Unknown: only on my own projects. Non yet and work stuff. So big news, I am currently launching the Xcode 13 beta. Jeroen Leenarts: Oh boy, you already downloaded it and unzipped it. That's always the thing with Xcode, right? Unknown: Yes. Let's see em one Mac. Right? That's cool. Installing components. There we go. Jeroen Leenarts: We'll have lunch over this fail. Unknown: Yeah, let's create a new Xcode project. Jeroen Leenarts: I do wonder if there's gonna be any updates to the Core Data Cloud kit syncing, really there is. Unknown: So there's going to be what is it, sharing is going to be enabled. And that's about it. Mostly, they're gonna also show off how you can do async stuff. Look at that. They have fancy icons now here. Jeroen Leenarts: But there's also going to be a new command line tool to allow it to interact with your cloudkit database. So with with schema, enter the records. So that's pretty cool. The platform State of the Union is, is at 11 in our timezone. And we'll see what will be in the platform State of the Union. And I reckon in the next episode, that will be next week. And we'll I'll have a lot more information on on what's actually going to be launched. And I hope that terribly, a lot of blog posts and articles out there about all the new great content that's in the Apple WWDC week. So Donnie, if there's anything that you'd like to share, now's your time, Unknown: buy my books, they will be updated for iOS 15. And yeah, I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this the next few months. Jeroen Leenarts: So do you have? Do you have a schedule already for yourself? Or is it pretty much you take this as it goes? Unknown: No, I don't know yet. I'm gonna make a list of things I want to see after this, and probably gonna poke around XSplit 13 A little bit, see if there's anything cool. Okay, and yeah, probably gonna take like three or four videos tomorrow, depending on how long they are to watch them. I noticed one accord data 100% of watch that could watch the concurrency ones. And I think by that point, my brain will be fried. And it's time for me to do more. Playing around. Jeroen Leenarts: Playing around with the new stuff is always good. Yeah. So people remember not to install the first data on your, on your main devices. Because you could be in a world of hurt if you try it. And keep an eye out on on all the great content that's going to be put out in the in the coming few weeks, really, because everything that's going to be announced this week. It'll take us all weeks to process afterwards. So I look forward to all the new content that people will be writing over the coming weeks. Only thanks for your time and talk to you soon. See you soon.