In a good way.
Yesterday I scrawled a few comments during the WWDC Keynote, and did 1 second reviews of the announcements on Snapchat, but I thought I’d jot down the tally of things I had hoped for against what was actually announced.
First, however, let me just say that the amount of work Apple showcased yesterday is just staggering. No doubt thousands and thousands of designers, engineers, operations, and more people made all of that possible. And watching the Keynote back this morning I’m left wondering if any of them have slept in the last year.
OK. Let’s start with the wish list:
- "I hope Siri can do a lot more" – Yes.
- Big changes to macOS – I think what I meant, and what we got, are different. However, what we got is pretty great. Some of the demos on the Apple web site are better than those that were shown on stage. And the "tabs everywhere" feature is bigger than it seems.
- Displays? Nope. But I don’t really care, honestly.
- Updates to tvOS? Yep. Big, big updates here. Looks like now is the time to buy an Apple TV.
So, pretty much everything I wished for.
Now, onto the things I wanted to see in Photos and iCloud Photo Library specifically. When I had written that post I separated the improvements that I hoped to see into two categories. I had a list for things I thought we’d definitely see and a list of things that I was skeptical that we’d see (due to the amount of work they are to do). Well, it turns out that I’ll be getting a lot of the things I thought were "pie in the sky" for Apple to release this year.
- Facial recognition more liberal – Yes. I think we got this and much more with all of the Google Photos-like "advanced computer vision" features. I can’t wait to see how well this works. If it works as good or better than Google Photos it will be mind blowing to a lot of iOS users.
- Sync Smart Albums – Unknown.
- Auto-generated Albums (for things like water, etc.) – Yes.
- Face tagging on iOS – Yes.
- Map view – Yes.
- Tagging on iOS – Unknown. (But I still hope)
- Spotlight – Perhaps. But it appears I can search for photos with Siri. "Show me photos I took yesterday" So I’ll take it.
Many of the other things that I had hoped they’d improve are under-the-hood improvements so I’ll need to wait and see if I get them.
As I was watching yesterday’s WWDC Keynote I felt like Apple was reading my blog and simply checking off the boxes.
