WWDC2016 – don’t get lost!

It was amazing 4 days for every iOS/watchOS/tvOS/OSXmacOS developer – watching the Keynote live, then getting all essential updates during the Platforms State of The Union and having sleepless nights to catch up with Apple’s streams (for those who were not lucky enough to actually be in San Francisco). Meanwhile, we were downloading all new betas. These have been very busy days!

Small notice: During next months there will be a lot of great articles, tutorials, videos to watch. In case you found something great, please tweet me @apan06!

Most important of all

If you in any way missed these two, I highly recommend watching them as soon as possible!

1. Platforms State of the Union – in my opinion, this one is even more important than the keynote itself. Please stop reading this blogpost right now and watch it. It’s a brief summary of current updates on all 4 Apple platforms – iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS. This is an absolute must see.
2. Apple Keynote – for me it was the worst keynote since I’ve been watching WWDC. No breakthrough nor surprises. But it’s still a must-see to be up to date with the direction in which Apple is going, and to know what will the best OS’es look like in 2016/17.

10 WWDC videos that you cannot miss

WWDC (for app developers) is all about sessions! You can watch them all on Apple site, but I’ve picked a few you would love! Order of the list is accidental.

1. Protocol and Value Oriented Programming in UIKit apps – this one is the continuation of the last year’s sessions: “Protocol-Oriented Programming” and “Building Better Apps with Values Types in Swift”. It’s great that Apple is still sharing with us some architecture tips. Remember to check out the sample code!
2. What’s new in Swift – what is new? How you can contribute? Why does Open Source Swift matter?
3. Swift API Design Guidelines – for me one of the biggest changes in Swift are naming conventions and making everything more swifty, so it would be clear and concise. With Swift 3.0 Apple has changed a lot of APIs – watch this video to understand why we will need to go through the Great Renaming.
4. Understanding Swift performance – how to keep on being snappy 🙂 I hope it will help you pick proper abstraction to use. Be aware that this is an advanced session.
5. Improving Existing Apps with Modern Best Practices – this session reminds us how to improve the quality of our code by doing simple things. This is really worth watching – especially if you feel that your code is rather like a spaghetti 😉 🍝
6. How iOS security really works  – if you keep your focus on delivering new features in a short time but you feel your security could be better – this session is actually the first session you should check out this year.
7. iMessage Apps and Stickers, Part 1  & Part 2 – I love it when Apple gives us new toys to play with. iMessage is a new environment in the Apple world where we, as  developers, could add new values. Check out how you can create iMessage Apps, stickers keyboard and more!
8. Introducing SiriKit – Siri SDK has possibly been one of the most demanded iOS frameworks since the introduction of Siri in iPhone 4S 🙂 But this talk is also about Siri Experience – voice communication is something new given to developers – we really need to have a good understanding of it.
9. Introduction to Notifications and Advanced Notifications – notifications are possibly the most important part of our apps and for a lot of them they are a great engagement tool. Improvements and changes in notifications are huge. These two videos are a must for every app developer.
10. Optimizing App Startup Time – last on my list but very important. It’s hard to tell how many users you could possibly lose by long startup time. People really want our apps to be instant and with iOS 10 it’s way more important. It’s an advanced session, so be ready for good technical information.

Choice of WWDC videos for beginners

Sessions listed below are mostly targeted at new iOS developers but it’s a good idea even for more experienced devs to scan through the list and check out new things. I really hope this list could be a good starting point for new iOS developers!

1. Introduction to Xcode – this session is a brief introduction to using Apple’s IDE. If you are starting your iOS development from scratch, this is a good beginning.
2. Getting Started with Swift – if you’re thinking about learning Swift, it could be best to start with Swift 3.0. It’s updated with the latest features, syntax and best practices.
3. Introducing Swift playgrounds – Swift Playgrounds is a new iPad app created by Apple. This is a really powerful app that will help the beginners in diving into the Swift world. For more experienced developers it’s a great place to check out some ideas.
4. Making apps adaptive, Part 1 & Part 2 – nowadays, when iOS development is not about one phone with one screen size but multiple devices with different screen sizes, ratios, etc., learning how to make your app adaptive is the most important thing in the iOS development!
5. Measurements and Units – As an iOS developer I have found a lot of small functions written by devs just to convert units. Doing this by yourself is great but there is always a possibility that many developers are writing new conversion methods. In this talk you can check out how to benefit from using the formatting of units with some additional free localization out of the box.
6. What’s new in Xcode App Signing? – this talk is very important not only for the beginners but also for the old developers. People have a lot of issues and misunderstandings with the code signing. Why? It’s hard to understand. But luckily it could not be a big issue or a road block for new developers with small security knowledge!
7. Concurrent Programming with GCD in Swift 3 – Concurrent programming is possibly the hardest thing to master when becoming a developer. For Apple platforms – Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a powerful API that helps you make good use of your multithread CPU. With Swift 3 GCD is more swifty, so you should learn how to master GCD ASAP!

And one more thing

The Talk Show Live From WWDC2016 – John Gruber’s talk show with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi talking about WWDC 2016 🤓 Have fun!