Do you have an iPhone-controlled ceiling fan? Do you stand up whenever your Apple watch tells you to? Do you use Apple Maps or, heavens forbid, iCloud?
No?
Then this article is going to be something of a disappointment.
About WWDC
Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference was held last week. As you may know if you’re a coder, that is where developers from around the world can talk to Apple engineers about their latest technologies in face-to-face sessions. Also, there’s that big keynote for press, marketing, fans, normies, and anyone else wanting a summary of the next year of iThings.
Often this presentation (called “The WWDC Keynote”, or “The State of the Union” by the true believers) has some clear theme or focus, perhaps a massive hardware announcement. Not this year. Now that Apple is concurrently developing 4 software platforms, they can actually fill a two hour presentation with nothing but miscellaneous, unconnected software updates.
So let’s dive in, shall we?
watchOS 3: time to roll
You use an Apple watch? Really? My condolences. Waiting multiple seconds for your favorite workout app to load must be frustrating. The good news here is that watchOS 3 will load apps much quicker. They’ll be easier to find by pressing the side button and scrolling through a list of apps. Also, you will be able to track your “rings” (that’s what Apple calls them now, not even “activity rings”) right on your watch face. The watchOS messaging app can parse handwriting in English and Chinese, and you can make region-specific emergency calls from your wrist. A nice little convenience, for the least convenient moments of your life. There are also major enhancements for wheelchair users and mindful breathing enthusiasts.
tvOS: something or something about something
Apple has released an Apple Remote app for controlling an Apple TV from an iPhone. It has all the capabilities of the ordinary Apple Remote, plus a keyboard. It’s like 2008 all over again!
Users will only need to sign on once to access their various cable network subscription thingies and… I’m sorry I haven’t watched multiple minutes of television for months now I don’t know what to think of any of this.
Also, there’s a dark mode.
macOS Sierra: as below, so above
The current trend of imitating features from iOS and interfacing with it continues, starting with the name. There’ll be no more Roman numeral “X”: so eat a knife, Caesar. Apple pronounces it “maaaac ohhhhh es” but in my own mind it will be “macossssss” forevermore.
The new macOS Sierra will be able to unlock automatically when an Apple Watch is near it. Macs and iOS devices will now have a shared clipboard: you can copy on one device and paste on the other. There’s an Optimized Storage feature which can move rarely used files to -chokes up- iCloud automatically. Yes, as in those rarely seen files will only be on -gasp- iCloud. Before you switch to Gentoo Linux, remember that this feature is totally opt-in.
Every app that supports multiple windows will now support detachable tabs, like Chrome does. No developer modification will be required. If you are especially anal, you might think this is the first case of a company actually imitating features from ChromeOS. Your anus would be wrong, though: centOS and Windows 10 are both known to update automatically and uninvited.
Apple Pay and Siri are both going to be supported on the Mac. It will be possible to verify an web purchase using a nearby Apple Watch or the fingerprint sensor of an iPhone. As for Siri, there are some important differences from the Windows desktop voice assistant Cortana. Instead of making video game references, Siri will tell you that your “filin’ be stylin’”.
No, but really: Siri said that.
There’s a new picture-in-picture mode for videos that works in fullscreen. Don’t ask why that’s impressive. Just don’t.
iOS 10: Yes it’s been 10 years, feel old yet?
Apple calls this the “biggest release” ever. Not revolutionary or a major change, just big. It is big in the same way a vending machine’s selection might be big: there’s lots of little treats but no number of Cheetos can be called a meal.
First of all, there are a lot of new ways to use notification widgets, and they can be accessed from the lock screen. This actually is revolutionary: for friends who prank you when they take your phone. 3D touch can do more, which is fine if you use it, I suppose.
Siri has an intents API that will allow 3rd party developers to write apps interfacing with Siri, much as they would with Google Now on Android. Some “Siri intelligence” will also be used to enhance word suggestions when typing messages. If this sounds like it might involve a lot of data mining on Apple’s part, yes it does. Skip to the next section for more detail.
Photos will be able to display pictures on a map, with the positions corresponding to the location the picture was taken. At long last, I will finally be able to see how many of my screenshots were taken in the RCH dungeon. Actually, I hope it does separate screenshots from genuine photos, because the new Photos is supposed to be smart: smart enough to support facial, scene and object recognition. Much like Google Photos, but probably worse given Apple’s restricted data (skip ahead!). Photos also now automatically organize into groups called “memories” which will automatically assemble into slideshows of all the fun, fun times you’ve spent vacationing. Or RCH-dungeoning.
The Apple Maps app, which the world loves to hate, has been updated. It knows about all the nearby traffic and snazzy restaurants. If your car has iOS support, you can get turn by turn instructions right in the instrument panel. This part of the keynote reminded me strongly of my dismal financial situation.
The Apple Music streaming service has a new, peppy interface. At around 1:11:40 in the keynote, Apple Music executive Bozoma Saint John presented a demo and those were easily the best minutes of that silicon church sermon. Everyone got up and danced! For only a few short moments, unfortunately.
The Phone and News apps were redesigned too, but didn’t really feel notable. Communicating entirely through chat is pretty hip right now, and I mean, who reads newspapers anyway?
There’s a new default app appearing on the iOS home screen: it’s called Home and it will be used to control HomeKit supported home automation devices. I’m sure that will confuse nobody, ever. Home supports video doorbells and can unlock your house door right from the lock screen: yet another revolution for pranksters who grab your phone. This felt like another reminder of my social-financial situation, and that was before Craig Federighi mentioned a HomeKit compliant hot tub.
The biggest change for the perpetual angsty teenager that wears my skin is iMessage. In addition to introducing a bunch of real flashy animated features and a sticker store (much in the style of Snapchat, WeChat and the like), this was also a part of the keynote which was mildly self-deprecating and came close to acknowledging that sexting is a thing. It was right around 1:25:43, for all of you interested in watching executives try to be hip. In further weird developments, the keyboard in iMessage can detect words in your message that can be replaced by emoji, which is excellent for finding obscure emoji and converting all your text to emojinese.
This would all be great, if not for the fact that they’re dropping support for my cracked, struggling 3rd generation iPad.
Intelligence, Data Mining, and Privacy
Google is really, really good at analyzing large amounts of data and teaching computers to find meaningful links between them. Amazon is also somewhat capable here. These skills, and the user data supporting them, are important for object recognition in photos and parsing human language.
Apple is relatively bad at this. This is reflected in the relative quality of Siri versus Google Now, and of *cough* iCloud and Google Drive. No amount of stylin’ or filin’ can hide the truth: that Apple needs to catch up. But how can they feed user data to their machine learning algorithms without compromising the privacy of their users?
In last week’s keynote Apple announced their approach. They try to do as much processing as they can on the user’s machine rather than on Apple-controlled servers. They are also looking into a technique called differential privacy, wherein so much noise is injected into user data that it is impossible to connect a particular user to a particular data set. Said data is still useful for algorithms to learn from, however.
If you want to know more you should probably consult a distinguished mathematics journal, or failing that, mathNews.
Swift Playground
Apparently there were a record number of child attendees to WWDC this year: there was even a nine-year old. To ensure that even more cool kids show up next year, Apple spent the last few minutes of the keynote on Swift Playground: a cute iPad app for teaching children to code.
Surely there’s nothing of interest there for people who already know programming right? Right? That nifty coding-focused iPad keyboard, we’ll never see that again. The fact that a hundred-ish lines of Swift code with full access to the iOS SDK could be compiled fairly quickly on an iPad, that’s just for little toy demos. Yep. Nothing to see for this audience of accomplished developers, this is all purely for teaching the next generation how to program.
Beyond the keynote: RIP Find My Friends and HFS+
Some items outside the keynote that Apple announced this week may be of interest to anyone who managed to read this far.
The first is a simple, long-awaited feature for iOS: the freedom to delete some of the default apps. Not all of them: Messages will not be going anywhere, for instance. You also need the App Store to redownload the apps if you want them back, so allowing the deletion of the App Store would be an easy “screw my friend over for hundreds of dollars” option for those irresponsible pranksters I keep mentioning.
The next is an even longer awaited change: Apple’s dinosaur of a file system, HFS+, is finally going extinct. The replacement is called the Apple File System: APFS. APFS is optimized for solid state storage (TRIM is in), has the ability to quickly find directory sizes, can encrypt individual files or entire storage drives independently of the rest of the OS, and can make fast snapshots and clones of a whole system-worth of data. These features have existed for a fairly long time in enterprise filesystems: it’s good to see the consumer world catching up. APFS is still a developer preview: macOS Sierra cannot boot from it, and it is recommended that APFS users back up their data on a proven, reliable filesystem. APFS is only going to be deployed en masse next year, for every Apple device supported at that point.
If your eyes glazed over in that last paragraph, don’t worry. I’m sure Apple will make it all crystal clear during WWDC 2017.
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