WWDC 2019 Keynote - Summary

Introduction:

The WWDC 2019 keynote starts with a nicely dedicated video just for the Apple developers, what a heartwarming one when it connects with you so instantly, just WOW! 

They bought me here itself ;) Apple definitely plays around with our emotions a lot!

These are the notes I made while watching the whole keynote and it contains a very HIGH-LEVEL summary. 

I hope it helps those who don’t want to watch the whole 2+ hours length of WWDC 2019 keynote video and just wants to grab the updates on a high level. 

Note: I might’ve missed some points/notes that didn’t interest me as well. 

So, without further ado, here are my notes:

Apple TV:

Multi-user support hence more personalized content than ever

Apple Music with lyrics scrolling on the side

Watch OS 6:

Numerous watch faces (I liked the gradient & sun location based ones)

Audiobooks (Hear on the go)

Voice Memos (Record on the go)

Calculator (Including the ability to calculate tips and split the bill with friends)

Independent watch apps (Watch apps aren’t dependent on iPhone now)

Dedicated App Store

Activity trends with a long term analysis. (If you’re a fitness freak and always seek to get notified about your long term progress, this is a game changer for sure)

Hearing Health - It provides you the analysis of the sound in your environment embracing your hearing health and they kinda mocked Amazon Alexa saying that it doesn’t record or save any audio ;) It aroused so much laughter

Menstrual cycle tracking (Also available on iPhone’s Health app) - Womens are going to love it and several 3rd party apps are going to shut down their businesses

iOS13:

Pre-Note: iOS12 Adoption Rate = 85% [Android 9 = 10%] (They gave this comparison and it raised some laughter)

50% smaller app download size

60% of smaller app updates size

2x faster app launches

Dark Mode (As expected by many)

QuickPath Keyboard - Swipe to type (Expected long back)

Photos Share sheet/options shows people with the people in the photos

Music app - Displaying lyrics with music time sync (This will also make other/related music apps go out of their businesses)

Mail - Rich text formatting support

Reminders: (This was expected a long back and this will again make other businesses to run out)

Revamped from ground-up. 

Smart list to keep track of the tasks

Create tasks with activity/image or by tagging people

And so much more. [I believe that I’ll finally have to delete all those tasks/reminder apps from my phone]

Maps: (It still won’t be able to compete with Google Maps)

Ways to save the places to the collections 

3D view of the places

Share ETA with friends

Privacy improvements:

Location: (This change will the lives of several apps terrible)

Just Allow Once - Allows the app to use the device location only once

Background tracking alerts - iOS will give reports on what/when all the apps are tracking

Wifi & Bluetooth protections - They’re shutting the doors on that abuse as well (I need to do see a way how they’re doing it)

Sign in with Apple ID:

Available on all Apple devices and the web.

User can choose to reveal (or not) their email ID or any other personal information

When users don’t reveal their email address, iOS generates a random email address to the app and each randomly generated address is unique to the app and the user can choose to retire/delete/disable those random email address once they’re done with those apps

HomeKit:

HomeKit secure video - Analyses in your home’s Apple devices. It saves video up to 10 days, encrypts and saves to iCloud and don’t count against the storage

HomeKit enabled Routers - It acts as a firewall to the devices in your home

Messages:

It auto-detects the numbers and displays the name & photo or Memoji of the person linked to it

Memoji comes with a whole pack of makeup set with numerous options to configure your hats, glasses, hairs, lipstick, tooth, eye shadows, etc….

Memoji stickers - iOS generates a sticker pack for all your memoji’es and is supported on all the devices with A9 chips.

Photos:

Portrait Mode - Lightning effect.

Edit photos with swipe option for every effect.

You can now rotate, apply filters/effects to the VIDEOS, yes you heard it right, you can edit videos on your iPhone.

The photos browsing experience is modified through machine learning by decluttering the screenshots and duplicates.

Siri:

Announce Messages - When Siri reads the message to you, you can just respond to it and it’ll send the message automatically

Connect multiple AirPods to one single device to share the music/movie and watch it along with a friend.

Hands-off to HomePod - It plays the music exactly from where the iPhone/HomePod left off

100,000 radio stations added/supported from around the world, could be asked to Siri to play.

HomePod can recognize who in the family is talking and personalize the response based off of them

Dedicated Siri Shortcuts app to list/configure all of it from one place

Siri voice now comes from Neural TTS[Text to Speech] aka it is more natural due to machine learning optimizations and the voice is completely generated by the system

Few Other Hidden gems: (These weren’t introduced but they were mentioned in the slides)

Wifi selection on Control Centre

Low Data mode

Separate iCloud accounts for personal & work

iPhone Silences unknown callers

Indian English Siri voices

Xcode 11 has a mini-map

And so much more…

iPad OS:

[This is the first time where they’re introducing a dedicated platform for iPad after nearly 10 years of its introduction]

Pin widgets right onto the home screen

Split screen improvement - Swipe up from the side panel brings up all the apps that were previously displayed onto the sidebar

Multi-tab apps (yes, you can have multiple instances of the same app in multiple windows. Demo with Notes completely was fantastic)

App expose to display all the open windows of the apps

Files:

Column view (just like on Mac)

iCloud Drive folder sharing

USB/SD drives can be plugged in to copy the files [ You iPad is like a mini-computer now, although this seemed to have been targeted towards Indian consumers ;) ]

Safari:

Desktop class browsing [You’ll see the desktop version of the sites and not iPhone sizes, but does it has any more work than to change the ‘user-agent’?]

Download manager

Keyboard shortcuts

Fonts: 

Now, Custom Fonts can be downloaded from the App Store to use across all the apps

Gestures:

Grab the scrolling indicator to jump through the long documents

Ability to drag the cursor around (Seems same as iOS experience to me)

Drag for text selection (Seems same as iOS experience to me)

3 finger swipe in - once/twice to copy/cut

3 finger swipe out to paste

3 finger left swipe to ‘undo’ (No more shaking of iPad) [And I think right swipe is to ‘redo’]

Apple Pencil:

Earlier it had the Industry low latency of 20ms. This is now reduced to 9ms [Drastic improvement for sure]

PencilKit API opening up to 3rd party developers to improve the app/Pencil experience

Markup mode: 

Swiping from the bottom with Pencil brings up the markup with the screenshot

Mac Pro: 

[Mac with the highest configuration ever for powerful workstations/studios]

28-core Intel Xeon Processor

1.5 terabytes of system memory

Pro Display XDR

Pro Stand which is rotatable aka you can view your Mac in Portrait mode (But the cost of $999 ignited some memes ;) )

Mac OS - Catalina:

iTunes: (What all can iTunes do? Everybody has this Q in mind)

They mocked the Q by making a screenshot with Calendar/Mail/Safari inside iTunes, ROFL, it was wonderfully mocked by Craig. (A must watch @1:44:00 for Craig fans for sure)

iTunes is now 3 apps: Apple Music, Podcasts, Apple TV

Device syncing now happens in Finder

SideCar: 

Use iPad as a 2nd display for the Mac

Accessibility: (Voice Control is leveraged to a whole new level)

You can now control your iOS & Mac devices with just your voice, any physical motor diseased person is going to be blown away for sure. (The demo was nice as well)

Rich dictation & editing

Local Voice processing - No audio recording/saving

Find My: (It works in tandem with Find My iPhone & Find My friends)

It now works for Mac as well and that too in offline mode.

This is how it works for Mac in Offline mode:

Mac sends Bluetooth beacon signal to the nearby iOS device and theses devices in-turn sends the signal to the other nearby devices until the Apple server detects one and this whole signal relaying process is encrypted and anonymous.

Activation Lock:

Macs with T2 chip can be locked if stolen and it won’t reboot until done with the user’s credentials

Screen time on Mac:

You can now have a consolidated report of all your devices usage.

Project Catalyst:

Pre-Note: 100 Million active Mac user base

Developers can now develop or port the existing or new iPad apps to Mac platform with very fewer efforts. (The words described by JIRA iOS Engineer weren’t much satisfying though as it didn’t address anything specific and I think they made him speak to simply connect with the audiences)

Basically, an iOS developer can now develop apps for iPhone, iPad & also the Mac. It just opens up a ton of opportunities for every app on the iOS App Store.

Augmented Reality:

RealityKit: 

Create 3D effects in a new way. 

Photorealistic rendering

Environment & camera effects

Animation, physics, audio, Native ARKit integration, Swift API

Reality Composer: 

Design/Model/Compose 3D objects

Built into Xcode but also available on iOS devices so that developers can edit, test and tune on any of them

ARKit3:

People Occlusion: Can detect people’s position on camera and you can basically create an animation scene/movie. (Minecraft demo was just fabulous)

Motion Tracking: It can now track people’s action/motion and apps can create graphics to motion [Remember the scene from the Tamil movie: Jeans(1999), where the lead actress does a double role with the motion capture tech? You can now create the same scene from your iPhone]

Swift:

Pre-Note: 450,000 apps on the App Store using Swift

Objective-C was built on AppKit(Mac) & it eventually ignited the creation of UIKit(iOS), so when Swift was introduced, access to these frameworks were mandatory but Swift is actually meant to deal with a new UI framework and hence they introduced Swift UI, a brand new UI framework, which literally marks the end of the AppKIt & UIKit frameworks and of course Objective-C. Jeez! This is like going into a fucking whole new world for the developers.

SwiftUI:

All new UI framework

Declarative syntax

Swift Code

A completely Interactive Development

You can develop apps for all Apple platforms with the tool, with a common interface.

Conclusion:

WWDC ended up with a fantastic 'SwiftUI'.

And Tim Cook making a note of the Apple employees dedicated work by sacrificing their family times working on these improvements for years was a bit heartwarming for people who feel and be in the same situation most of the time.

Here are my interesting ones from the releases:

SwiftUI

Project Catalyst

SideCar

Login with Apple ID

Dedicated iPad platform

Accessibility changes

What are yours?