WWDC 2016 Initial Impressions

SceneKit and SpriteKit Availability

You can now utilize both SceneKit and SpriteKit in your watch apps. At first mention I thought this was just for games, but then Apple explained another use case: creating nice custom animations for regular apps.

The current limitations of UIKit on the watch prevent developers from creating custom animations. But with watchOS 3, you can add live 3D rendered content to your apps using .scn files bundled with your resources, or you can opt to create interactive 2D animations with bundled .sks files. It will be really interesting to see what developers do here!

Complication Improvements

When a user adds your complication to their watch face in watchOS 3, you gain the ability to keep your app in a ready to launch state and get a guaranteed 50 push updates per day. This is a pretty compelling reason to provide a complication if it makes sense for your app’s data. Perhaps even in some instances the complication data may not be that valuable to a user but the added benefit of faster app launch is.

tvOS 10

The updates to the tvOS SDK seem pretty light.

There is a new concept of single sign-on with TV providers so that users can authenticate with their provider once and be logged in to all supported video channel apps. So if you develop apps that need this level of authentication please check out the VideoSubscriberAccount framework!

The main items of interest for tvOS are that there are a number of existing frameworks made available to developers:

• ExternalAccessory
• HomeKit
• MultipeerConnectivity
• Photos
• ReplayKit
• UserNotifications

macOS

After 15 years, OS X has been renamed to macOS to better align with the other three platform names. The latest version of macOS is macOS Sierra.

I’m personally not a macOS developer, so I’m not going to dive into this much. However, I do want to highlight one feature that is particularly interesting to me.

Apple Pay for the Web

With macOS Sierra users can make purchases using Apple Pay on the web!

This is huge for any developers working on a web site with eCommerce, as it lowers the barrier of entry for a paying customer almost entirely. Imagine not having to deal with the security concerns of handling customer credit card data – and even better, the confidence your customers have knowing that their credit card information is not being stored on various web sites.

As far as I can see it there is no reason (barring legal commitments) to not add Apple Pay support to your websites. The process involves integrating an Apple Pay JavaScript framework.

Apple File System (APFS)

Last but not least, I’d like to discuss something that is relevant across all of the platforms: Apple has announced an entirely new file system!

Had I not listened to John Siracusa talk about file systems on various podcasts I would have never expected this. The improvements appear to be pretty great though!

The current file system used by default is HFS+ which was released in 1998 when floppy disks were still a thing. Today most – I am looking at you base model iMac with your 5400RPM HDD – new systems include fast Flash based SSDs. The Apple Filesystem was designed with Flash/SSD in mind and built with native encryption.

The user benefits include things like crash protection, space sharing, cloning and snapshots. Crash protection uses a copy-on-write metadata scheme which ensures that updates to the file system are crash safe and reduces the need of journaling used by HFS+. Space sharing allows multiple file systems on the same disk to share the free space available without the need to repartition the drive.

Cloning provides the ability to create instant “copies” of files and directories that cost nothing in disk space. Due to the copy-on-write behavior the cloned files and directories are not actually copied unless modifications are made. *NIX users might relate this to creating symbolic links, it’s the first thing I thought of, but I am sure there is a ton more to it. Finally, the snapshotting ability allows the system to create a read-only instance of the data so that it can be efficiently restored to a given point in time.

Where To Go From Here?

So that concludes my initial impressions of all the new goodies in store for us this year.

As I mentioned, I haven’t had a chance to look through everything yet, so I may have missed some buried gems. Please let us know if you spot anything, we’re just as excited and overwhelmed by all the new content!

In the meantime, we’ll be working hard on making some new written tutorials, video tutorials, and books in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! :]