WWDC: I’m excited!

I have to say, Monday’s keynote to this year’s WWDC was probably the best Apple keynote I’ve seen in years. There was simply far too much for me to get excited about in there 🥳

  • Dictation in iOS will be handled on-device only! No more calls to the central servers so I feel finally safe to also use it 🙂 Same goes for translation support by the neural engine!
  • It will be possible to hide pages on the iOS home screen! Hopefully this will finally be the end of the mess I call my phone’s home screen 🤪
  • Scribble support in every input field on iPadOS. This was basically the feature I’ve been waiting for to finally get a newer iPad with Pencil :D
  • AirPods can now automatically switch between devices depending on where you have something with an audio channel
  • Sleep tracking on watchOS
  • Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as AppleTV+ exclusive! If I remember correctly, this series was the first sci-fi I read as a kid. I was sitting on some beach either in Greece or Italy, bored, and basically killed that book rented from a library in a day or two. I think, after nearly 30 years it might be time to re-read it 😅
  • Heck, I’m even excited about their transition to ARM-based CPUs for their Mac hardware. I cannot remember how it was back when they moved from PowerPC to Intel but having a $500 hardware dev-kit available sounds definitely like a good way make the transition easier for developers!

And these are just the things that come to mind right now. I’m pretty sure that over the course of the week I’m going to find more things to look forward to and to play around with. From a developer’s point of view I’m especially looking forward to mess around with the improved Swift UI handling in Xcode 12. Coming from React+Redux I like the whole concept but the IDE support in Xcode 11 was simply not good enough for me to actually also enjoy it. 🤞