WWDC 2021 — It Is Not About the OSes

June 12, 2021
5 min read

It’s that time of the year again, when Apple shows all the new things in all the different OSes. This year though, the presentation was a bit light on narrative, but pretty packed with features.

What became obvious pretty fast — it doesn’t make sense to divide this presentation by OS and I think in the future Apple will just talk about services and apps because everything works everywhere.

Since we are not there yet, they still talked about each OS separately, but more often than not it ended with a “feature is available on all other platforms as well”.

FaceTime

Even if all those features were announced last year it still would have been a bit late, not to say — fall of 2021. But better late than never. I was surprised how janky the Voice Isolation demo sounded, but I hope it will be good in the released version.

SharePlay is an interesting feature, but I don’t see myself using it much. We’ll soon have cinemas opened for vaccinated people, and I’m not a big fan of watching TV shows with friends. But there are probably people who want this. I could see myself watching sport events like that, but I don’t think local TV providers will support this feature soon (or at all).

Focus

In 2021 Apple re-invented profiles which you could’ve found on Nokia phones 20 years ago. You can now create Focus modes for work, home etc. It allows you to make different home screens for different modes and allow notifications only from certain apps or people. This also means, that you can put multiple launchers for one app.

There is Summary for notifications, which will show only the most important ones and Do Not Disturb will show a message when someone tries to reach you via iMessage (similar to Slack).

iCloud and Privacy

You can add people you trust for an Account Recovery, so when you forget your password, you will be able to restore it with their help. You can also choose people as legacy contacts, so they can access your Apple account in case of your death.

On a lighter note, Mail now has an option to hide your IP, location and whether you’ve opened a message, basically rendering tracking pixels useless.

Privacy Report which was introduced last year in Safari for websites will now be available for apps. It will show how often an app has accessed Location, Camera, Contacts, Photos in the last 7 days, as well as all the domains the app is contacting.

Siri has on-device speech recognition, which for me is not so much a privacy improvement, but a massive improvement in speed.

Paid iCloud is now iCloud+ with Private Relay — which encrypts Safari traffic (almost like a VPN). It will also let you hide email, by creating random one for forms on websites.

Safari

Safari got a redesign on all platforms. Tabs are now very compact and in line with the address bar. There are also tab groups, which you can name, and they sync across devices. On iPhone, the most significant changes are — address bar is on the bottom, you can now slide across tabs with the same gesture as you do sliding across apps and web extensions will be available on mobile.

QuickNote

On iPad, you can swipe from the corner with the Apple Pencil and a small Notes window will appear where you can make a note. If you do it on a website, it will show you the note next time you visit it. The QuickNotes sync and work across devices.

Universal Control

This was probably the best demo of the keynote. You can use a single mouse and keyboard to control all your devices. Just put your iPad besides the Mac and you will be able to move the cursor from Mac to the iPad without any setup.

My mind was blown, when Craig added the iMac on the left of the MacBook and used the mouse to go all the way from the iMac to the iPad through the MacBook in the middle and dragged the file across three devices just to drop it on the iMac.

iPadOS 15

This actually is a bit of an exception, since there were a couple of iPadOS-specific features. First, as everyone could have guessed they added Widgets, with some bigger options (up to a quarter of the screen). App Library is also available on the iPad now and is accessible with an icon in the dock and by swiping to the last page.

The multitasking is rethought… again. It is more visual, with buttons and hints.

It is possible to develop and submit iOS and iPadOS apps to the App Store from Swift Playgrounds.

Miscellaneous

  • Apple Maps are even more amazing in San Francisco.
  • Government IDs, house and hotel keys and work ID in Apple Wallet
  • Low-power mode on macOS.
  • You can AirPlay to the Mac (both the video and sound).
  • Multiple timers on Apple Watch (but only on Apple Watch).
  • Conversation Boost — focuses AirPods Pro on the person talking to you. You can reduce the amount of ambient noise in the settings.
  • Shared With You — things shared with you in iMessage will appear across multiple apps (Music, News, Podcasts, etc.)
  • Live Text — you can copy and paste text from the photo (seems to work flawlessly in the demo). And it can recognise objects.
  • Shortcuts for Mac, which will replace Automator.
  • Health Sharing — you can see data of your parents or kids. Alerts, like for heart rate or steadiness. Apple doesn’t have access to this information.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions

June 11, 2019
2 min read

Most people jot down some notes about keynote overall and then write or talk about each release in more detail. I’ve went my own way, first going through impressions for each OS – tvOS, watchOS, iOS, macOS, iPadOS and also for Mac Pro.

Now I want give my overall impressions about presentation. I mostly agree with Marco – Apple started listening again. And the reason is pretty simple on it’s surface – iPhone sales. Although thanks to increasing prices for a couple of years revenue from the iPhone didn’t fall, but unit sales plateaued. So now Apple has to sell iPhones more aggressively and give more attention to all other products in the lineup.

This was noticeable in every announcement, it wasn’t apologizing per se, but it felt like Apple was overcompensating. There were ver big changes that got at most one sentence mention during the Keynote and a lot of them were just a text on the slide with “everything else that’s new”. 

There was something for everyone, be it developers, users, professionals. We’ve got new OS, new hardware and new frameworks. We’ve even got the trailer for TV show. All of this in just 2 hours. The pace was unbelievable. Presenters were very proud of the product, just look at the display demonstration. 

I like how passionate, knowledgeable and funny Craig Federighi is. I’ve seen some of the first of his presentations and it’s not even close. It’s a very big growth in presentation skills. This year the biggest joke was about iTunes and with Craig delivering it – it landed perfectly. 

Overall, this was very strong keynote, one of the best in recent years actually. And this gives hope that Apple is able to make products and also improvements to those products afterwards, even if those aren’t iPhone.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – iPadOS

June 10, 2019
5 min read

Earlier in my impressions of the iOS, I’ve mentioned how when presenting it there was almost nothing said about the iPad, all of the features were mentioned in the context of the iPhone and it was very pronounced. You could definitely see, that it’s intentional, that’s because this year iPad got itself a new, dedicated OS. 

Is this marketing? Yes, of course, iPadOS is still the same iOS just with some feature specifically designed for the iPad, but that always was the case you don’t have always present dock on the iPhone and multitasking is limited to the iPad. Why change the name? For a couple of years we’ve started to realize that Apple improved iPad software only every other version of iOS. Versions 9 and 11 were just such versions. Heavily focused on the improvements for the tablet. But wouldn’t it be great, if iPad got improved every year, like all the other systems? That is the hope of this marketing move. 

With iPad getting it’s own OS it will be much harder to ignore it during the next WWDC. As someone who is more and more leaning toward this future of computing, I like the change and hope that our collective desires will come true. 

With all of this introductions, there was actually a lot of news this year for the iPad.

Let’s start with the improvements from iOS – PS4 and Xbox One controllers support. On my recent trip, I’ve got just iPad Pro with me to watch movies, import photos from the camera, read and play. I can see how I would throw in my DualShock to the bag to play games. With Apple Arcade and some good games for the iPad that would be very interesting. 

Some time ago Apple decided that you don’t need split keyboard on the iPad Pro. I could see with heavy marketing of iPad Pro coupled with Smart Keyboard Folio you would think that it’s not necessary. But sometimes you just use iPad naked and in those moments new small iPhone keyboard underneath the finger is an amazing addition.

Another feature that I love is importing directly into the Lightroom. USB drive and flash support is also nice, but direct import of photos to the Adobe software is amazing. Right now it’s clunky as hell. You have to import photos from camera, then import them to Lightroom and delete photos from the Camera Roll. There is a Shortcut for that, but it never works for me – photos are imported as JPG and not RAW.

Desktop class browser and download manager in Safari – this one grants finally. Although, as I understand, it’s mostly limited to Apple sending information to the website that it’s Mac Safari and by hand improving how the most popular websites work. Time will tell how well it will work and how scalable it will be.

Another feature that only can be judged in use – new gestures. There are now three finger gestures for cut, copy, paste and undo and redo. Also moving the pointer is similar to drag and drop. That on the very first try the presenter couldn’t do it, doesn’t give much confidence. Those gestures could be great and get into your muscle memory or totally forgettable and you will only see them in “Top 5 iPad features you’ve never known” articles.

Some great additions to the Apple Pencil. First, the latency was reduced from 20ms to 9ms. Right now it feels pretty instantaneous, I don’t know how much better will this feel, but it must be good. Second, PencilKit API – now apps that don’t rely on Pencil input as a business model (drawing or note taking apps), can implement similar features as Apple has in Apple Notes.

You can also, with a Apple Pencil gesture, capture and entire web page and annotate it. This is something you’ve had to download utilities on the Mac to do, and it’s built in.

Probably for the first time since the introduction, Apple made some changes to the Springboard. Now there are more icons on the screen and when you rotate the iPad they stay at the same place, finally. Second – you can pin widgets to the main screen, which makes home screen much more dense and rich with information.

Some welcome improvements to the multitasking. You can now have multiple windows of the same app opened, either side-by-side or in split view with some other apps. You can easily find all the windows of the same app with App Expose, which looked easy to use and nice. 

Also, making slide-over, eventually a little iPhone, where you can go through the couple of iPhone sized apps sounds as a big improvement to me. I often though about this idea when using slide-over.

This is the first year of the new iPadOS and it feels like pretty strong one. A lot of new features and improvements make for a release I’m probably most waiting for. All of this could even make me install beta on my iPad this summer, that’s how excited I am.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – macOS

June 8, 2019
5 min read

This was a surprisingly powerful part of the keynote. All the talk before the WWDC was about iPad improvements and Mac Pro, so I wasn’t expecting such a strong showing from macOS. First, the name – Catalina, sounds beautiful and I don’t even know where to start, there was so much. 

Screen Time for macOS – logical addition. It helped me to realize how much time I’ve spent on social media, but after that didn’t use it almost at all, hope with some improvements and macOS version will use it more.

The break-up of iTunes, the end of the era. It was arguably the iTunes and the Music Store which helped Apple to reach the position it has right now. Instead there are three new apps and iPhone synchronization moved to the finder. The two apps I probably won’t use – TV and Podcasts. One of them, Podcasts, is made using the new developers tools I’ll mention later, but I will wait for Marco Arment to port Overcast app to the Mac, as his sound engine is superior and synchronization between devices is a key feature.

The one app I intend on using more is Apple Music. Right now, even when I’m working on my MacBook and with ease that you can switch AirPods to the Mac I listen to the music from my iPhone. iTunes for using Apple Music just sucks. It’s so big an clunky. 

The one feature I liked the idea of during the presentation – Sidecar. I’ve also heard only good things about the app after the keynote, but then I’ve found out I won’t be able to run it on my Mac, because it’s too old. So maybe I’ll have to buy Luna Display after all. This actually is very representative of something that everyone calls Sherlocking – Apple copying something that 3rd parties do already. They do some part of it, but not all, so developers can still sell their devices or software to those who need something more powerful or, like in this case, to those who have older computers.

I loved the presentation of Voice Control, fortunately I don’t need it, but the video looked very lovely. It’s nice that Apple tries to provide the way for everyone to use their devices.

Again, one of those things that has been tried before, but probably can only be delivered by the company of Apple scale – MacBook private Bluetooth beacon. When someone steels your laptop it sends Bluetooth signal (very low power, so battery won’t drain) to the nearest Apple devices and this creates mesh network which in the end provides you with the location of the stolen device. Amazing, with the amount of Apple devices in the world, this solution is the one that can definitely work.

As I’ve mentioned before I have an older Mac, which doesn’t have Touch ID, I love how my MacBook unlocks itself when my Apple Watch is near, now it will be possible to do even more, that is the promise of Approve with Apple Watch. Hopefully it will work on my MacBook and Apple Watch and will help me everyday, so I won’t have to type my passwords all the time.

One of the biggest additions this year – Project Catalyst, that is continuation of last year mentioned Sneak Peak, which everyone called Project Marzipan. Let’s not dwell on the name Catalyst in macOS Catalina. I’m sure it will be a bit of a struggle to remember which is which, but the macOS name will change in a year, so the problem won’t stay for long.

The idea behind it is helping iOS developers to port their apps to the macOS. From what Apple showed us it looks good and right at home on the Mac. Again, Podcasts app was written using Project Catalyst and from the looks it’s hard to tell it apart from Apple Music. I love that at least some of my favorite iOS apps will come to the Mac, like Overcast for example. 

The apps Apple decided to show off on stage were a bit odd. Calling Asphalt 9 Legends and Amazing Mac App, was a bit much. Although it’s a developers conference, but Jira is not the most beloved software in the world, but it proved the point, now you could move your iOS app to the Mac.

The last big thing that got mentioned and I will discuss it here was SwiftUI. It’s a new framework which makes making an app so much easier. It will work on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV. And looking at the demo, I wanted to again try to learn coding. 

So as you can see, pretty strong keynote for macOS. I think it shows that Apple is still serious about Mac and there is hope that this OS will have bright future.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – Mac Pro

June 7, 2019
2 min read

Between the trash can Mac Pro going for a couple of years without an upgrade and problems with MacBook Pro keyboards, you could see how Apple was not very serious about the professional market (excluding iPad Pro, of course). But then Apple assured everyone they are working on the new modular Mac Pro and also release iMac Pro. 

It was hard to imagine how Apple can release a more powerful machine and boy did they deliver. Speaking in car market terms this is super car. It is even close to the concept car. The amount of power this cheese grater looking machine has is unimaginable to me. 

I still can’t believe there is a computer in the world, which you can just put on your desk with 1.5TB of memory. I don’t even hame so much storage between all my computing devices. 

I hope pros are really happy with this announcement and will be able to use it. I can’t even imagine how much the top of the line configuration will cost, $40,000?

Pro Display XDR

This is probably the most controversial announcement from the keynote. This is the most amazing display I’ve ever seen. Basically Apple presented the $40,000 reference display for under $10k, now it sounds better? 

Regarding the stand – I will sound like a fanboy, but this looks like the most precise and engineered stand for the monitor. Also, this display is for professionals, who have mounts already on their desk, the display part is swappable, so when they buy a new display they just put it in place of the old one. They don’t need a stand and it’s actually better that this one is sold separately. 

The one thing I wish Apple would do and I think a lot of people agree – also make a prosumer display. Take iMac 5k display and sell it separately. Right now if I want to buy Mac Mini or even an external display for my laptop or iPad I have nothing from Apple, I sure won’t spend $7000 on a display. 

Overall, even as someone who doesn’t need all this power, it was amazing to watch what is possible and it sure shows that Apple is still serious about pro Mac market.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – iOS

June 6, 2019
5 min read

One of the most notable changes of the last year was the focus on iOS 12 working better and faster on older devices. You could see the improvements even on the one year old iPhone X. This year Apple also talked about iOS 13 being more optimized. Apps will launch 2x faster, smaller downloads from the App Store and Face ID now unlocks 30% faster. 

Before the keynote, it looked like this year would be quiet for the iPhone and most of the improvements will come to the iPad, as it was mostly ignored last year. During the iOS segment, iPad wasn’t mentioned at all (later about that), but the segment itself was long and not because they tried to make it that way, there was just too much to show.

Mostly those were some little things, like the ability to download large apps over cellular (not all the countries in the world have limited mobile internet), low data mode (which is nice in Europe, where we don’t have roaming, but data is a bit limited when you travel to other countries) or emoji button which is now separate from the globe (very welcome addition in this part of the world, where almost everyone has 2 or more languages added). I will also add QuickPath here (that’s Apple version of the swipe typing. This is a feature Android had for years and I’m using Gboard on my iPhone right now, but would love to dump it, if Apple also adds haptics to the key presses).

But there were also some monumental changes, like the ability to select Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth device from the Control Center. This was on a lot of wish-lists probably from the day Apple showed Control Center. The other one – Volume Control is now on the side of the screen, I think even John Gruber would agree, this one grants a big fat finally.

The feature Apple started presentation of iOS with was Dark mode and it did look cool. Right now there are a lot of apps that feature dark mode on their own, but I don’t use it in all of them. I’ve realized that I’ve turned off dark mode on almost all “content” apps, like Pocket, Twitter, Bear etc. But have it turned on in Overcast, for example and I like the dark interface on macOS. I think here will be something similar. I’m sure I’ll use it, but hope I will be able to change it app by app.

Two apps that received big updates this year were Photos and Reminders. If in case of Photos there was the whole demo of the app, surprisingly reminders got a short mention. It looks like totally different app and I think it could be a great choice for someone in the middle – current Reminders are too simple for my needs, but something like OmniFocus is a total overkill. As I’m using GoodTask right now and it uses Reminders as a backend it will be easy to try new reminders out when the app comes out.

I didn’t like how Photos app looks, but that may just be presentation, will need to check it myself. The much better photo editor and the ability to edit video are great new additions. I liked the Years views, which is something similar to On This Day, but more discoverable. Also the ability to hide duplicates is nice, I wonder if later Apple will let you to remove those (after review, of course).

The other feature I loved was sound sharing through AirPods. This is amazing for travel. Last time we’ve had 10+ hour flight, I’ve had to pack two pairs of wired headphones and a couple of dongles, it looked bizarre. I also don’t share headphones with anybody, so from that point of view it’s amazing, sometimes I want to give my colleagues to listen, I can just share the sound. 

Privacy and Sign-in with Apple

I was thinking of making it the whole separate post, but decided to leave it here. As always Apple is very straightforward about privacy – they don’t need your data, so you can trust them. One great example is location permission, in iOS 13 users will be able to grant access just for one time and you will receive notification if some app uses location data in the background.

The other privacy focused addition sounded great during presentation, but when some details came out a lot of questions were raised. Sign-in with Apple – a lot of apps, when you are signing-in using Facebook or Google, get more information then they actually need, so using this feature Apple will provide only the most necessary and you can even choose if you don’t want to share some information. Additionally, if you don’t want to share your e-mail, you can sign-in using randomly generated e-mail which will forward messages to the real one. Again, sounds amazing. But then, after the Keynote it was discovered that this feature is mandatory if your app uses any other “sign-in” provider. I’m all for new privacy focused features, but here one of the biggest companies in the world uses it’s power to dictate their service. 

This is a very dangerous territory, right now it feels like the trust in Apple is unimaginably high, but what will happen when some key people will be changed? Do we really want to grant so much power to one big player? I think there are only good intentions from developers inside Apple who made this feature and people who decided it will be mandatory, but there is a little of fear for the future. Hope this fear is unreasonable.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – watchOS

June 5, 2019
3 min read

Don’t have a lot of time for writing today, so it’s very fitting that watchOS is next in my series of posts about WWDC. There were not a lot of changes and most of them might seem minor at first glance, but could have some big implications. 

Watch Faces

The most noticeable thing for the users are new Watch Faces. They look good on the big screen, but I’m not sure they will be functional and will they be available to the older watches? Also, we didn’t get any information on old watch faces – will they be updated? In my opinion, after Apple focused mostly on Health features of the Watch, watch faces became the worst “feature” of the device. It’s hard to find the best one, especially if you don’t have Series 4 Apple Watch.

Chimes and Silent Taps

If I started with the negative aspect, let’s get all out of the way. Chimes and silent tap every hour. I don’t think I imagine myself using silent tap like ever, but maybe someone needs this function, but chimes? Who would need their watch to sing every hour? Just … why?

More personal Health app

One of the most interesting features that got presented was – Activity Trends. This is one of those features that shines on the iPhone, but you still need Apple Watch to gather all the information. Apple Watch gathers so much data, but there is no story behind it. This year Activity Trends brings much needed analysis of the data.

A couple of health related features are very welcome additions. Not for me personally, but I could see how helpful Cycle Tracking would be for women. I know there are apps on the AppStore, but with Apple stance on privacy, this is great addition. 

Hearing Health – this could help a lot of people. I could see being at the concert and moving somewhere farther away from the sound source if the watch tells me it’s too loud. 

App Store and independence

Probably the biggest feature of this years release of the watchOS – App Store. Sure, at first it looks funny, how you search and scroll, look at screenshots on such a tiny screen, but this is just another step towards independence of the Watch. I can see how in 2-3 years you would be able to buy cellular Apple Watch and set it up without ever needing to connect to the iPhone. 

From the development point of view Independent apps, App Store, Streaming Audio and SwiftUI – all those things will help to untie the Watch from the iPhone.

And this last bit is what I meant in the very beginning. Every one of those features by itself may seem minor, but bring them all together and you’ve got a strong contender for the future.

WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – tvOS

June 4, 2019
2 min read

It’s that time of the year again, Apple announces a lot of new stuff, there are millions of hot takes on the Internet (including mines) and nobody is satisfied. This year though, there was so much for everyone it’s hard to write one summary. During the presentation I’ve made bullet list of the most interesting things and it is miles long. I will try to mention only the things that matter the most to me.

I will focus today on the very beginning of the Keynote and mostly on tvOS.

The video from the beginning showing the struggle of the developers, was very believable and not only applicable to the developers. Comparing to the previous years it was very “safe”, but not worse because of that.

I still can’t find the reason to buy pretty expensive Apple TV. But Apple tries more and more to give me that reason. Most of the changes to the tvOS are similar to the changes to other operating systems. They showed the TV+ service and Apple Arcade. What made me believe a bit more into the idea was the support for DualShock and Xbox One controllers. This is pretty great, as I have one and I believe there will be some interesting games I would want to play on Apple TV. The segment was very fast paced (like almost all of the keynote), but I thought in the room fool of developers and such a full packed keynote, it was not very fitting to spend the time on the trailer for the new TV show. Although now, when I hear or read opinions – at least the press loved it. There was also a moment when Tim Cook was showing some “amazing” feature and waited for the applause, but there was silence, it felt like a Samsung conference, but it got only better and better after that.

Right now on the Apple website there are previews of everything they showed in the keynote – iOS, iPad OS, watchOS and macOS, but nothing about tvOS. This seems very telling. There were almost no changes to the OS itself, mostly the presentation about the services that were added on top.