First day of WWDC

My first day at my first WWDC is over and it’s been a great day! The keynote announced many silly things such as the Memoji, your personalized Animoji, but also a lot of neat things. Below are my initial reflections after the first day at “dub dub”.

AR is just getting better

Apple seem to be doing a lot of work with AR and they probably believe in it a lot. ARKit was just announced last year and today the next version ARKit2 was reveled. This is a major upgrade and enables many new cool features in realm of AR. What impressed me the most was the possibility to share AR worlds, meaning you can play with or against other people in the same augmented world. The bottom floor at the event has 3 dedicated tables where people can try the open-sourced AR demo game Swift Shot.

Be in control

Apple, like Google did on their developers conference, put a lot of emphasize on letting people be in control over how much they use their devices. With iOS12 it becomes easy to monitor and see how much you use your phone and the different apps. You will be able to put time restrictions on how long you are allowed to use certain apps for. This is perfect for families with kids where you might want to restrict certain content.

The OS also becomes less distracting and have improved “do not disturb” features as well as enhancements to push messages.

Siri more present

Siri seem to be getting a higher presence in iOS12. With the introduction of Shortcuts you will be able to create commands that Siri can carry out for you. This could for instance be “I’m going home” which prepares your smart home’s thermostat and messages your partner that you’re on your way. I see great potential in this together with IoT systems. I’ll probably write a bit more about this topic later as I get to know more. Hopefully these new Siri announcements mean that we’re able to program more useful behaviors for Siri.

watchOS, same but better

I don’t think many were so impressed with the watchOS updates, but for me personally there were many small things that I’ve been bothered with that have been resolved. The automatic start and ending of workouts is one good example of such a feature, a feature that by itself isn’t really impressive, but has huge value. Being able to track your cadence is also something I’m very pleased to see (useful for runners).

I’ll continue adding more reflections throughout the week, so stay tuned!