WWDC 2016

Apple held WWDC today at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend checking out the keynote, as it’s jam-packed with information about the upcoming versions of watchOS, tvOS, iOS, and the newly-coined macOS. While watching the keynote, I made note of a few things I’m excited by.

• Dark mode for AppleTV: I use dark mode on everything I can, and the option to change for the extremely bright white interface is a welcome change.
• Universal clipboard via Continuity: I’ve tried many, many ways to transfer text between iOS and macOS, including Pastebot, email, and using Slackbot in Slack as a middleman. All of these solutions were sub-optimal. If “it just works”, this will end our long national nightmare of trying to figure out how to copy text from our iPhone to our Mac (and assumedly, vice-versa).
• Picture-in-Picture: I’ve investigated using applications like Afloat to keep windows on top of others, but have always been turned off by the needed setup. Now, with the click of a button, I can keep Twitch, Youtube, or Vimeo in a neat little window.
• Apple Pay for macOS: I use PayPal for many of my online transactions, thanks mostly to its ubiquity around the internet. However, I admire Apple’s dedication to privacy and security, especially with Apple Pay, which I use everywhere I can. If I can pay for purchases from Amazon with Apple Pay, I may never leave my house again.
• Siri for Mac: Filing jokes aside, Siri for Mac could provide powerful file-searching capabilities. No more find . | grep {filename} for me. We’ll see if my developer colleagues let me live this down.
• Lock screen and home screen redesign: I really like the look of the new lock screen, including the addition of more complex gestures and 3D Touch (also seen on the homescreen). The lock screen in particular was starting to look dated, and I’m glad Apple’s iterated on it to improve the amount of things you can do straight from these areas of the phone. It looks like I have a reason to use 3D Touch for the first time since the first week of owning my iPhone.
• Siri API: I was initially extremely excited about using Siri to control my phone more. I’ve used Siri more frequently recently, and it’s gotten much better compared to my previous attempts at using it consistently. However, I was disappointed to discover that the Siri API will only work with certain categories of applications. It looks like Apple has a solid start, though, and I expect more categories to be added in the future.

Those are just a few of the notable things that stood out to be personally. However, WWDC 2016 was incredibly packed with software announcements, and I’ve still much to read. Let me know your thoughts today’s announcements on Twitter.