@nolim1t

Image: Front of the Moscone Center in SOMO San Francisco

It’s thet time again. Where the future of where the tech industry is headed is decided. Apple despite the critics, still does good innovations (at least they feel more polished when they are released - mostly).

Christmas in June for geeks (especially Apple Geeks), but in general developers because there is some focus on Open Source Swift and Web.

Here’s what I’m excited about:

• Xcode 8 - Better provisioning profiles yet again! (one of the suckiest things about iOS development)
• Swift 3 - Some improvements to make code more readable (i.e. Show warnings if there is output variables which isn’t used. I liked that unused variable warning feature)
• Swift Playgrounds app - Looks really cool. I’m going to have to get an iPad again I think just to try this out.
• iMessage SDK This is Apple’s answer to the chatbot revolution. Also, another awesome addition is
  • Stickers and also custom messaging apps (think sending payments/gifts to people!).
• Siri SDK I still don’t use Siri a lot but, this is something that I’ve been interested in since I’ve been doing a bit of Siri hacking back in 2011 to inject custom phrases and responses into it (See SiriProxy). Looking forward to seeing some Siri Stuff on the appstore.
• Watch OS 3 Looking forward to the improvements to make Apple Watch more useful. What I most look forward for is faster app launching. Launching apps on Watch OS feels very sluggish UX wise, so it’s very off-putting. And I try to avoid using Watch Apps (except the Authy one, it’s quite useful)
• Apple Pay on the web (aka say goodbye to PayPal): It may not be bitcoin, but I like this because the merchant (or any middleman) does not see any credit card details. Everything is stored into the Secure element part of the iPhone / Apple Watch chip.

On iOS 10 some notable stuff

• Users can now remove Apple inbuilt apps (about time)
• RAW photos can now be shot with the camera
• Using your phone you can unlock your Mac OS Sierra computer
• VOIP Apps (Skype, Facebook messenger, etc) if properly integrated now behave like phone calls when someone is calling you. The phone number is just got “sherlocked”.