Here we are again, on the eve of another WWDC, feeling…weird. Excited. Ambivalent? Curious. Did I mention excited? But also kinda annoyed. And some of you? Some of you are downright mad.

There’s a cloud hovering over Apple Park again, and it’s not just the pandemic. It’s bruised developer relations. It’s alleged anti-trust violations. It’s App Store scammy-ness. It’s the weight of a million different expectations and quibbles, from “make the iPad more like the Mac” to “let the iPad be an iPad,” from pro hardware announcements to satisfy developers, to hints of an augmented reality revolution to satisfy those hungry and excited for the post-staring-at-screens era.

And then there’s the shareholders. Can’t forget the shareholders.

Caught in the middle of it all, then, are the lovely Apple employees we know (or are lightly acquainted with) and love. They show us their work with such deliberation and care, such passion and delight. They made our iMacs colorful again. They made it possible to control an Apple Watch with one hand. They work on Notes, on tvOS, on Safari, on SwiftUI, on hundreds of teams that make things millions of people rely on. And if any of them are reading this: I appreciate you, and I hope you have an awesome WWDC week. I can’t wait to see what you’ve been working on. There’s always something announced at WWDC that just blows me away, and I know this year will be no different.

Speaking of different, Apple’s slogan used to be “Think Different.” Apple does many things differently, such as its environmental initiatives, focus on health and accessibility, and emphasis on privacy. But Apple is a big company and big companies naturally become stubborn, entrenched in tradition, and difficult to steer in different directions.

Unfortunately for Apple, the winds of change are blowing, have been for a long time, and are reaching gale force. In various regions of the United States, the coronavirus’s progress has been stymied and the phrase “back to normal” is bandied about as if it’s a sure thing, as if “normal” is something we have managed to recover, rather than something new being slowly born from the ashes of a horrible year.

While some have learned absolutely nothing from this experience, others are finding a renewed understanding of what’s most important to them. A country obsessed with work is toying with the idea that the way we do and view work might not always be the best way. And amidst all of this, an absolute reckoning involving the way we treat one another, and the way our entire society is structured to, consciously or unconsciously, treat some worse than others.

There is palpable anger toward so many in authority, whether in government, or at companies like Apple, for a failure to listen and a refusal to even consider change.

I’ve said this before, but I believe one of the single most important leadership qualities is humility, which by definition requires listening. If Apple executives listen to their employees and developers, decide their requests are not in line with the company’s core values, and say as much, that is one thing, because at least it’s honest. If, however, their requests or ideas align with the company’s values, but clash with its traditions or shareholder expectations (or simply aggravate the executives’ hubris) and they dig in their heels and tighten their grips, they are rightly deserving of criticism and, dare I say, scorn. And I think they’ll find, as the winds of change continue to blow, that they’ll eventually be caught in a storm they can’t escape, driven along on a course they did not chart for themselves.

It’s not about giving in to every little demand being lobbed at them. It’s about collecting information, determining what the right thing to do is, and doing it the Apple Way. When Apple does that and does it right, the results are fantastic.

Let’s hope we see some of that Apple shine through this week.

❤️

Michael Tsai, the master of round-ups, has begun a list of WWDC wishlists, including mine. However, I wanted to highlight a couple of excellent wishlists that I only discovered because they linked to mine (yay for pingbacks!).

The first is by Steve O’Dell, who helps run a Girls Who Code after-school program at Bacon Elementary School in Colorado. His wishlist stems from a desire for Apple to once again become a major player in the education space.

Did you know that Apple has coding club packages that are (potentially) every bit as good as Code.org or Girls Who Code? If you don’t, it’s because the links to find it are all over the place, links to older versions haven’t been taken down yet, and instead of providing a club portal that does some of the admin for you, they aren’t much more than a PDF telling you how to get started and then leaving it up to you to execute.

I definitely did not know that. Apple has clearly committed itself to the areas of health and accessibility. Education seems like an obvious “third leg” to an overall strategy that seeks to improve global well-being. Health, accessibility, education. If I was in leadership at Apple, that’s what I would focus on.

The next wishlist I wanted to share comes from Daniel Andrews. It’s a great list; some of my favorite things are feature parity for Messages across platforms, the return of the magnification loupe, making better use of the iPad status bar, and improvements to search on iPad. He also mentions some specific improvements to Mail:

Better priority/VIP notification settings, snoozing emails etc would go a long way to making the default ‘good enough’ for most folks.

I would also add to that the ability to create Smart Mailboxes on iOS (as John Gruber mentioned), a search function that actually works (I can go to Gmail on the web and find what I’m looking for almost immediately. Mail usually comes up empty.), text formatting tools that aren’t all hiding behind a single button, the ability to easily see which email address an incoming message was sent to from the unified inbox, and yeah, something better than flags for assigning message priority.

E-mail should be so much smarter. How about a “This Week’s Newsletters” folder? How about a way to view all recent attachments? An email from the pharmacy that a prescription has been refilled and is ready for pick-up should automatically be transformed into a to-do list item in my app of choice. All of this should be possible. And that’s all I have to say about that!

Keep those wishlists coming! I’ve really enjoyed reading them.

Wow, what a conference, eh? Like most, I’m still processing the many new frameworks and APIs that Apple presented to us last week. So far I’ve watched 12 session videos, taken copious amounts of notes, and spent lots of time thinking about what all of this could mean for my app. As such, this post will be an attempt to organize those thoughts.

SF Symbols

When I wished for more standard system icons that could be used anywhere, I definitely did not expect Apple to deliver over 1500 of them. I feel particularly validated by Apple’s instructions for creating custom icons: find a symbol in SF Symbols that resembles what you’re looking for and edit the SVG. I feel validated because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing to create all my icons in Snapthread, except that my custom icons are based on a $25 set of 200 icons from Glyphish. Browsing through SF Symbols, I think I can replace nearly all of my icons with them, with maybe two exceptions.

The Big Functionality Giveaway

One huge point that nearly every presenter hammered on was that if you follow the Human Interface Guidelines and use Apple’s frameworks as-is, you get a TON of functionality for free. In fact, one major goal of SwiftUI is to handle all of the basic features of your app for you, so you can focus on perfecting your app’s cool, custom features. For example, if you use SwiftUI correctly, the system will automatically handle animating view changes beautifully. If you use semantic colors, Dark Mode just works. Localization behaviors for right-to-left languages, Dynamic Type—these are all things you get for free if you use Apple’s semantic font sizes and SF Symbols.

I think it was Mike Stern who said something like, “if you spent time recreating what UIKit gives you for free, with custom controls, you may want to…I don’t know how else to say this…stop doing that.” Launch Storyboards, resizable interfaces, and support for split view multitasking will all be requirements starting in April of 2020. I don’t think the message has ever been clearer: follow the HIG, use the tools we’ve given you, be a good platform citizen. Just do it.

The New Peek & Pop

If you haven’t watched “What’s New in iOS Design,” you should. Peek and pop have become “contextual menus” that are now available and accessible on all devices. “Use them everywhere!” Mike says in the session. Apple wants these contextual menus to be so pervasive that their users expect to find them all over the place. An important thing to note is that any functionality placed into a contextual menu should also be accessible from elsewhere in the app. There are convenience methods for adding contextual menus to table view and collection view items, which I plan to use so that users can perform common actions on video clips in their timeline. Overall, I think this is a great change.

Dark Mode

I wasn’t particularly excited about dark mode prior to the conference because my app, like most other video and photo editors, already has a dark appearance. However, now that I’ve learned more about it, I really like the way Apple’s colors, fonts, and new “materials” adjust to trait changes. For instance, if you use semantic background colors, there are slight variations for “base” and “elevated” states. Apps are elevated when in split view multitasking so that the black separator between apps can be seen more clearly, and controllers and views are considered elevated when they are presented modally. The whole system seems well thought-out, and I plan to adjust my code to use semantic background and font colors, as well as the new “materials” options, and then simply force the whole app to use dark mode (which, incidentally, is as easy as changing an Info.plist value).

Combine

I…don’t understand Combine yet. I mean, I sort of do. I don’t feel like I need to understand it yet, though, because there are only a few places in Snapthread where I could make use of it. I observe values on my AVPlayerItems, there’s a few UserDefaults I keep track of, and maybe a handful of Notifications. Anyway, I’m sure it’s really awesome; I just need to re-watch the videos and read a few more articles before I can grok it.

Collection View Improvements

Collection views got a major API upgrade this year with completely new ways to lay them out and configure their data sources. Like SwiftUI, the new layout API is both compositional, and declarative. The most common crash in Snapthread has to do with the collection view inside my custom photo/video picker, and I still haven’t managed to figure out what’s causing it. This probably sounds terrible, but: I’m hoping that by using these new APIs, the problem might just go away!

In fact, I’m hoping a whole pile of layout-related bugs will be eliminated, which brings me to…

SwiftUI

My code sucks. It just does. I’m inexperienced, I’ve had no mentors or code reviews (by choice—I’ve had offers from many great people!), and there are fundamental concepts of programming that I only have a tenuous grasp of, at best. Despite my best efforts, I’ve utterly failed at using the MVC model. My views are all up in my model’s business, I probably have delegates where I don’t need them, or, on the flip side, other weird hacky ways of communicating between view controllers (like via viewWillDisappear and unwind segues, and all sorts of odd places) where I should have just used a delegate.

With SwiftUI, I feel like I can finally just burn it all to the ground. SwiftUI makes sense to me because it is declarative, and I love it because it forces its views to rely on a single source of truth. One of the items on my wishlist was for “every visual customization that is possible for a UI component [to] be editable in Interface Builder.” As a modern replacement for Interface Builder, SwiftUI delivers on this request with gusto. There’s a TON of advanced drawing stuff you can do with SwiftUI and all of it is immediately preview-able without building and running the app. That blows my mind!

SwiftUI has some missing pieces. There’s no control that provides the functionality of a collection view. You could probably hack together some HStacks and VStacks, but you wouldn’t get caching or cell reuse. For now, UICollectionViews can be wrapped in a UIViewRepresentable-conforming object to be integrated into SwiftUI. If you’re working with videos, you still have to work with AVPlayerLayers. Live Photos are still previewed in a PHLivePhotoView. I’m sure there are many other frameworks that make use of UIKit classes as well.

Still, my urge to re-write Snapthread is strong. By re-writing most of the app to use SwiftUI, I’m confident that I’ll be able to edit it on the go next year, when a first party, Xcode-like code editor will likely arrive on iPad. I’m also confident that it’ll be way less buggy, and way easier for future me to understand, since all dependencies will be so clearly defined. I’ll try to share some of my new SwiftUI knowledge as I go!

I’ll have to drop support for iOS 11 and 12. Before I do that, I want to add one more feature and maybe some more music to the soundtracks list. It’s going to be a busy summer!