There was a lot of excitement at WWDC today. A strong emphasis was placed on software and performance. There was a lot of new software releases and updates announced including iOS 12 and macOS Mojave. During the State of the Union, more features in the tools we use as developers were announced. Xcode received significant updates to its source code editor. Some new features include multiple cursors refactoring, Git integrations, parallel simulator test executions, and more! More tools and features around debugging were introduced as well as testing. Some other mentionable releases included Siri Shortcuts, AR Kit 2, and a new UI Framework for notifications. There are of course a host of new features coming to iOS 12, watchOS 5, tvOS 12, and macOS 10.14. One feature that I thought was pretty impactful was around notifications in iOS 12. In this release, the user is given much more control over their notifications then ever before. Notifications can now be grouped together in stacks. A new “Do Not Disturb” bedtime feature will prevent notifications from even appearing on the screen during sleep hours. The OS will also prompt you to turn off notifications for apps you haven’t open in a while. It will be interesting to see how these changes will impact users and developers alike. One other cool announcement was that coming soon, in 2019, there will be a way to “port” iOS applications over to macOS! Let me know what you think? I will try to cover more of these tools and other features that I feel could improve our workflow over the next few days.
