The robots team is back at Apple’s main developer conference.
mc_murphy bealex vani2 collected the main news that developers and users of iOS (and Android) will discuss in the next few days (and a couple of months).
1. Security
After a string of scandals with platform vulnerabilities and data leaks, Apple is trying to rehabilitate itself and spend almost a quarter of the presentation on the story about privacy and security. We are repeatedly told that all calculations are performed locally, and no personal data gets into the cloud - at first glance, it sounds attractive, but this is the reason why Siri is so inferior to competitors. It is extremely difficult to build smart services without placing all the calculations in the cloud, and this volitional decision has been haunting engineers and pulling the platform back for years.
- A new password management infrastructure has appeared: the system will automatically insert OTP codes from SMS, check your passwords for security and repetition.
- In macOS, the system for obtaining permissions to use location services, the camera, etc. has been reworked and works in the same way as we used to see in iOS.
- Safari increasingly hits the advertising business - now the system will try to completely prevent tracking on the fingerprint of the system and the browser, and another part of the advertising industry will start to become a thing of the past.
2. Augmented Reality
According to the announcement of ARKit 2, it is clear that the company is going to invest heavily in augmented reality and beyond. If last year’s version was a kind of prototype, we didn’t see any serious applications on this technology, this time is completely different.
- Added the ability to view objects of augmented reality simultaneously from multiple devices - in the WWDC demo zone it works like magic, and the devices are actually synchronized in real time
- Virtual objects can be attached to real ones, and all together it becomes a full-fledged powerful tool, and not just entertainment. You can walk around objects right in AR and add new parts and components, and do it with colleagues or friends. On the demo around the designer LEGO lined up a virtual world.
- When you turn off the application with ARKit, the system will remember where the object was located and how it was placed. This means that in real work you can now continue from the place where you finished and use the application with augmented reality as a working tool.
- Apple will release its own application Measure, and its accuracy on the demo impressed. In fact, all sensors are now calibrated so that it is possible to measure distances along three axes of coordinates with a centimeter accuracy.
3. Development Tools
It is not completely clear why the developers are so fond of the dark theme. Because you constantly have to code at night, when a bright white background burns out your eyes? Maybe it just affects the work in the terminal, which was originally dark with light characters? But at the film show the biggest applause was frustrated by this particular feature. Dark Xcode (along with a dark theme for the entire OS in Mojave) pleased us all without exception (well, ok, except for those who use the dark Apcode theme a long time ago).
- Some of the features that were lost when rewriting Xcode in the previous version were restored: folding / unfolding code blocks (and a bar-bar indicating different levels of nesting), marks about changes relative to code stored in the repository.
- Added support for Bitbucket and GitLab, to already existing support for GitHub (and also automatic installation of keys for working with ssh and all sorts of trivia).
- Changed the behavior of the assembly system. Let me remind you, there are only two of them: the old and the new, which was shown for the first time a year ago, and which in the tenth Xcode turned into a “standard” one. How is she better? Understands the dependencies in the code - you do not have to recompile the project floor if one line in the application changes. The assembly system itself was also accelerated - it is promised that the speed increase reaches two times.
- Now you can work with a multi-cursor. Insanely handy thing, which is in any decent editor, is now in the usual Xcode.
- The part responsible for ML and Metal was very serious. The second one got a few tools that allow you to debug shaders, literally poking at a pixel and seeing which code is responsible for rendering it. For ML, CreateML appeared, allowing to train neural networks directly on the device.
- Special mention deserves Instruments. Until now, we used only those tools that were provided by Apple, now you can create your own, showing exactly the metrics that are needed by a particular application.
- Testing has also become more convenient. You can run several identical simulators at once, in order to run a subset of tests on each of them - the test should take place up to four times faster. There are doubts about unit testing, they are so small, but for UI tests this is an absolutely irreplaceable feature that will speed up the process, if not by a factor of ten, then at least several times (and, therefore, write more tests and sleep more easily) . Tests can be run in random order, which will help to identify unwanted dependencies.
4. Bug work instead of innovation
It was rumored that this year they would firmly take on the bugs in the iOS system and begin to clean up the dubious moments - this is what happened. Some (including the authors of the article) hoped to restart the UI-style, as it once was with iOS 7, but there were no facts behind these rumors.
- They promise that system performance has multiplied. Even on older devices, applications will run several times faster, the keyboard will open, the camera will turn on.
- On iOS, a new Shortcuts application will appear, in which you can create ready-made scripts, and then call them from Siri. This is a recent acquisition by Apple - a start-up Workflow, and it did not even change the design.
- In Animoji, on new iPhones, language recognition and new characters have been added that can be constructed from yourself - Memoji.
- In FaceTime there were group calls. The demo showed a call for 20 people, and all the videos were perfectly transmitted. Normally, Apple does not release raw applications, so there is hope that a system will appear where video calls will work well. True, only between Apple devices.
5. Cross-platform? No I do not think so
MacOS has a lot of small innovations. The black display mode of the system (for which we, the developers, will need to adapt our applications), all sorts of nice little things in the Finder. But the most interesting thing is what will happen to the development stack.
- The poppy now also has copies of News, VoiceMemos, Stocks, AppleBooks applications. These are copies - that is, the interface was not rewritten under macOS.
- Apple has long been carrying out a secret project for porting UIKit from iOS to macOS, and this tool is already being used internally for application migration experiments.
- Developers all this will be available in 2019, and it is not clear in which part. Apparently, iOS apps will run on macOS after minimal adaptations and code actions.
- All this will make a strong competition to web applications (Slack, Netflix and all-all-all) and, most likely, will greatly enrich the platform.
- Under the guise of poppy completely rewritten AppStore. The new application, it seems, is still native, but it looks very similar to what has been accompanying us on iOS since last year.
6. Digital Wellness
Apple introduced the ability to view detailed reports on the time spent in applications, reduce the number of notifications that are generated by users and group them for convenience.
- Expanded Do Not Disturb Settings: iPhone will automatically detect when you go to bed and turn on this mode, or it will automatically turn off when you go beyond your current location.
- The operating system will keep a record of the number of notifications from each application and suggest disabling them if you notice that you have not used this application for a long time.
- In the new section, users will be able to view full reports on the time spent in the applications and, if desired, set limits on the use of, for example, social networks. And if you can still ignore all the warnings, then in the mode of use for children the application will be blocked from the ends. This will probably help people spend their time more efficiently.
In general, the developers have received unusually many nice improvements this year, let's see how cool and high-quality applications this will allow to create. And those who were waiting for new products and glands will have to wait until September.