The bear I mentioned. Turns out (after closer inspection and research) it is likely a ~400lb male black bear. At one point, I was about 10′ from him.
🔉 Listening to this week’s Micro Monday. My ears were burning! 🙂
The Swift Era begins
Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.
We were all biting our lip waiting for Marzipan/Catalyst to not suck and Apple was busy building an all-new way to create interactive UIs for their entire line-up of devices.
I’ve watched some of the SwiftUI sessions already. It looks very impressive. It has definitely taken cues from declarative web frameworks (in the best way possible) and brought those lessons into the more structured native app world*.
If I were rebuilding Summit, my never released iOS app, I’d throw out my entire UI layer and use SwiftUI without even thinking about it. As Brent wrote, SwiftUI is the future of UI development on all Apple platforms – both released and as-yet-unreleased – for the next few decades.
* It may be because I’m currently writing a React app, but I can’t help but notice the similarities between it and SwiftUI. To have a framework that manages state and updates the UI according to that state is such a powerful way to build modern UIs. Where SwiftUI keeps a “source of truth” about a view’s state, React keeps a “virtual DOM”. Great tools and each have their place.
Finished Watchers by Dean Koontz. ⭐⭐⭐ – Odd. Seemed like two stories in one and oversimplified narrative. But, it had a few tense moments.
I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript this week. It has been fun. React is a pretty compelling framework for building a web app. Did I mention we’re hiring?! Please come and help me. I need it.
Random WWDC 2019 thoughts
Random WWDC 2019 thoughts:
- The iPadOS updates look like a good start to a new OS just for iPad. Esp. connecting storage. Looking forward to 3 years from now. Imagine how much more capable than iOS it will be.
- The Mac Pro isn’t for me but I’m very glad it exists. The performance really is mind-blowing.
- The new Display is amazing. It will be a number of years before it is affordable though. Truly a pro product. The audience’s reaction to the price of the stand is amazing.
- The speed updates to iOS (and the reduction in app sizes) seem like huge, huge news for this release.
- The simple video editing tools are stellar. I cannot even count the number of times I would have used that feature since 2007.
- Sign In With Apple is overdue but very welcome (though, unsure if I will use it or not, but good for many people)
- SwiftUI looks promising. I will be interested to hear the community’s response to it.
- The un-bundling of iTunes is finally happening. This happens to all popular software.
- I’ll be interested to see how font management works on iOS.
- I will withhold judgement until I use Dark Mode – but the only time I use it currently is in a code editor.
Overall, this seemed like a solid, solid WWDC. I’m sure there will be a lot more news over the coming week. But to me, it addressed the main things I was looking for: a commitment to the Mac, iPad OS updates, and for Marzipan (now Project Catalyst it seems) not to suck. Looks like I’ve got them all.
Repost: Alex Hoffmann on the importance of WWDC 2019 for him
This week’s WWDC is going to be a make-or-break situation for me. It’s going to determine whether I will continue to consider Apple’s tablets worthwhile or if I’m going to move to a Microsoft Surface Pro once they release one with USB-C/Thunderbolt 3.
I’m telling you. This is an important one on many fronts.
The importance of WWDC 2019
Whether I’ll like the outcome or not, the cards are stacked for Apple to weigh in heavily on all these things (including possibly by inaction, to focus much more on iOS) come Monday. If optimism left me easily, I would be typing this on a capable PC laptop instead (although possibly swearing equally at a UWP Windows future). But I am holding my breath, because one way or another, when all of WWDC has been summed up, we’ll be able to look back at it and say that it was the moment where everything finally, ultimately, irrevocably changed.
This WWDC, which starts today, seems to be the most important one since the App Store debuted. I wonder if Apple feels it as well or is it just the entire community wondering whether or not they will be using Macs in a decade? Today could tell us that.
/via Marco Arment on Twitter.
