WWDC 2016 Review

So that was a bit of a relief for WWDC this year, eh? Generally in line with the more sober predictions, no massive upheavals anywhere, nice steady evolution, and new integration points in all sorts of interesting places! Even keep 32-bit for another year, only the clearly underpowered A5 devices got dropped this time around. Videos are pouring into WWDC.app for your viewing, and while you try to block out the time to watch them all and join the discussions at WWDC16 on Github, which looks like a neat idea:

The purpose of this project is to create a place where the exchange of opinions about WWDC16 sessions can take place. For each video there is a corresponding GitHub issue that serves as a place for a discussion regarding a specific video. Enjoy!

Here are some links to get you up to speed:

• Andy Bargh’s newsletter this week, WWDC 2016 Initial Impressions quickly hit the high points for developers.
• Op-Ed on WWDC 2016: What We Got, and What We’re Still Missing is a solid evaluation of the tentpole user updates this time around.
• iOS 10 Tidbits: Individual Read Receipts, Wake Alarm, Music Storage Optimization, and More is a good hub for discussions of the more subtle changes in iOS 10 you might have overlooked so far.

But the immediate concern for most of you — well, after Swift 3.0 Preview 1 Released, but that we knew about already — is most likely Xcode 8, which you’ll be pleased to hear looks like a pretty sweet upgrade all around:

• What’s New in Xcode
• Xcode 8.0 beta Release Notes
• We particularly like that it’ll support both Swift 2.3 and 3 to ease the transition there.
• And get this, Travis-CI already supports the Xcode 8 Beta initial release! Nice job, guys.
• And boo! They killed Alcatraz, but yay! for Xcode Extensions — A brave new world

So that’s Xcode. For API changes, start out with:

• What’s new in iOS 10 for Developers

And move on to the various backgrounders from the mothership:

• Foundation Release Notes for OS X v10.12 and iOS 10
• What’s New in Core Data in OS X v10.12, iOS 10.0, tvOS 10.0, and watchOS 3.0

If you mobile:

• What’s New in iOS 10.0
• iOS 9.3 to iOS 10.0 API Differences

If you desktop:

• What’s New in OS X v10.12
• AppKit Release Notes for OS X v10.12
• AppKit Changes for Objective-C

If you Safari, watch, tv, or whatever, run down the rest of the release notes list:

• Guides and Sample Code — Release Notes

In other news, the App Store Review Guidelines were completely rewritten; check out App Review Guidelines: The Comic Book. Yes, the comic book. And keep an eye on AppStoreReviewGuidelinesHistory.com for updates as the new format gets digested.

The Human Interface Guidelines are completely rewritten as well — bigger fonts! obvious buttons! cards! — and the API Reference has a sharp new look and organization too. The Apple documentation beavers have certainly been busy!

And if you have a bit more time, go poke around Guides and Sample Code some more and check out all the new code goodies added this week.

What, yet more time? Write an article about some particularly nifty piece of new kit. Here are some suggestions for starters:

• “The UIViewAnimating protocol defines the methods for implementing custom animator objects…”
• “The WKGestureRecognizer class is the base class for all other gesture recognizer classes…”
• “personNameComponentsFromString returns a person name components object from a given string…”

And for anything we missed here, check out Michael Tsai’s WWDC 2016 Links and BNR’s WWDC 2016: Developer Reading List!