Thoughts on WWDC

Better programmers/writers than me have already written a lot about WWDC ’14, so I’m not going to waste your or my time writing a summary of the conference.  Instead, I’m just gonna throw a couple of my own opinions out there ’cause that’s pretty much what I’ve got.

Things I’m Excited About as a User

iCloud Drive

I’ve just gotten used to using my iPhone (and iPad) in this sandboxed sort of way that Apple had intended, and I don’t think I’m the only one.  If I want to get an image from one app to another, I save it to my Photos in app A and reimport in app B.  Now that we’re going to have an honest to God file system, it’s going to be so easy to just use your files, like how we do every day on our computers.  Yes, I’m aware of (and use) iFile, but considering apps aren’t made with the intention to interact with it the way they will with this, it’s a (big) bit different.

Continuity

Yes.  I will use this.  Sometimes I just need to bring that Dark Souls II wiki with me after looking up how to get Hidden Weapon on my MacBook.

Actionable Notifications

It’s like biteSMS.  Sick.  I love that.

Things I’m Excited About as a Developer

Extensibility

Again, I’ve just gotten used to the whole “this is the app that’s running so that’s what you get to interact with” thing.  Now we’re going to be able to have code run while another app is running.  More than any other thing I saw at WWDC, this is what I think is going to be the biggest change to how we use our iWhatevers.

New Cocoa Touch Features

Self-sizing table view cells?!  Thank God!  Jesus Christ it is annoying laying a cell out for certain content only to have to do most of the work again to figure out how tall it should be.  Maybe this is one of those things where I’m an idiot and this shouldn’t have been a pain to begin with, but seriously: Thank you, Apple.

Also, the new SizeClass objects make a good deal of sense.  It’s also exciting because unless I’m retarded (and that’s possible), this is such a big hint that there are about to be differently sized devices.

Swift

Just ’cause why not.  This isn’t really that fun to talk about with people besides developers, to be honest.