The Road To Gold Begins, image from 9to5Mac

Pre-WWDC 2018 Thoughts & Day 1 Impressions

Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference 2018 keynote just finished and I’m pleasantly surprised! After the epic fiasco that was iOS 11 - I had basically ZERO hopes and expectations for this year’s event at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. Given the rumors that began circulating in January that Apple was going to focus on fixing iOS this year, I began to joke that Apple should just not even bother with their annual conference and push out iOS 11.5 in a desperate attempt to fix the absolute free-fall state of the iOS 11 release.

I had promised myself I wouldn't even bother with this year’s keynote. However as the date of WWDC came closer, I couldn’t help it. A part of me was getting anxious with anticipation, of a potential good payout for the iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 announcements that would essentially carry us into the next year. Another part of me was like a lunatic, rocking back and forth in a swing, chanting over and over again the same phrase - “it’s all a lie, it’s all a god damn fucking lie, Apple is going to shit things up even more this year!”

However, fate is not without a sense of irony. Last Saturday - 48 hours before WWDC 2018 - a video leak came out showing a supposed build of macOS 10.14 running with a system wide dark mode. IT LOOKED BEAUTIFUL! I have always been a fan of the “dark mode UI” since they not only look good but are also quite easy on your retinas, especially at night. This 11th hour leak tipped the scales in a certain direction for me and I began to contemplate the possibility that WWDC 18 was going to be a dark horse event.

So with a sense of newfound hope mixed in with still a huge amount of skepticism, I tuned into the WWDC 2018 livestream event this morning at 10 am to see where the winds would guide this ship. 2 plus hours later, I’m actually feeling not too bad about it. As usual, I wish there were more announcements regarding iOS - though as the rumors predicted - the major redesign got pushed back to 2019. But this year Apple went back to the drawing board to fix a lot of the basics it so desperately needed. The end result is quite exciting & hopeful to say the least!

So without further ado, here are the 10 most exciting announcements from the WWDC 18 Keynote

Let The Countdown Begin ...

10. Huge performance improvements for iOS 12. iOS 11 was probably the worst release in terms of performance. It was slow as hell, buggy, and overall a very sloppy production! It felt very different in spirit to the historical releases of iOS being quite polished. Apple knew this also, which is why when Craig Federighi (Senior VP of Software Engineering) took the stage, his first focal point was to declare about all the performance improvements iOS 12 packs - especially on older devices.

Screenshot from Apple

Federighi highlighted that for example on an older device like the iPhone 6 Plus: apps will launch up to 40% faster, keyboard comes up up to 50% faster, 70% faster access to the camera from the lock screen, share sheet comes up 2x faster, apps launching up to 2x faster under load and more! Furthermore, when you need a burst of performance, the processor will ramp up to max speed to “deliver the nitrous” basically and then will ramp down to preserve battery life. iOS 12 will support all devices that iOS 11 did and is bound to deliver some impressive performance boosts.

9. New AR Ruler App - Measure. When Apple announced ARKit in 2017, quite a few 3rd party apps popped up that delivered this functionality. Now this feature is a native part of iOS 12. Me personally, I’m not as pumped about AR as Apple is. But AR does have some cool uses - like this ruler app. You can basically measure the dimensions of objects in real life with this app. Want to see how big that beer pong table is?! Just point your iOS device running iOS 12 at it, and Measure will tell you the length and height and width of that beer pong table. A pretty useful and fun addition to have in your pocket!

Measure in action, screenshot from Apple

8. Smarter Siri. Let me get this out of the gate - I despise the “smart speakers” concept. They are essentially overly glorified spy devices that monitor you 24/7/365 and hence the only use I see fit for them is to be on the receiving end of Mjolnir or Stormbreaker! Aside from the impending Skynet statement I just made above, I’m glad to see that Siri is getting smarter on your Apple device.

Siri Shortcuts allows apps to expose quick actions to Siri. Craig gave a demonstration on stage showing how the Tile app uses this feature to help you find your keys. The Shortcuts feature will definitely make Siri a lot more useful especially since you can also add a custom phrase to the action. Hence you have things you do in a app paired with a custom phrase that Siri can quickly tap into.

Thus if its 1 am and you are in a new city and are looking to have some fun before your 11am flight out, you can potentially tell Siri to “find some gentlemen’s clubs nearby” and Siri will pull up all the results from the Yelp app (which you configured earlier) for this phrase and display them in a nice and efficient manner. Or if you are in a city that has reasonable last call hours, you can ask Siri to “find some lounges nearby” and Siri will pull up all the matching entries from the Foursquare app and present them all in the Siri UI. Pretty cool indeed!

Siri watched lots of Rick and Morty, screenshot from Apple

7. Improved Do Not Disturb and Notifications features.

Do Not Disturb mode got a cool new design and a handful of useful features! Do Not Disturb during bedtime will show you only the clock and will hide all notifications - very useful for not getting aggravated by notifications. When you wake up in the morning, Do Not Disturb will initially just show you the weather before easing you into the daily inbound notification storm.

Screenshot from Apple

Grouped notifications has a nice stacked card UI. You can tap on the card stack to expand it’s view and show all the notifications from that app. No more wading through 600+ notifications on a constant basis!

Screenshot from Apple

6. Photo Booth/Apple Clips style effects in FaceTime & Messages.

FACETIME FINALLY SUPPORTS GROUP CALLS - UP TO 32 PEOPLE!!!

The Messages/FaceTime effects are inherently a bit silly, but they are fun for goofing around and the workflow for accessing them is quite intuitive. I do think that Apple should have spun these off into a separate app à la a Photo Booth for iOS type of deal - but maybe in iOS 13?!

Screenshot from Apple

AND FACETIME AT LAST FREAKING SUPPORTS GROUP CALLS . . . UP TO 32 PEOPLE

The UI initially looked a bit weird, but I did appreciate that it took a more unique spin on the issue of displaying multiple people at once. But this is a Beta 1 release, so design might change before the Fall Golden Master release of iOS 12 is forged in the heart of Cupertino.

Screenshot from Apple

I’m glad to see that iOS 12 finally fills in a lot of holes, and paves the way for the rumored major changes due 2019. Now, macOS had taken a backseat to iOS for some time, but today Apple gave it some serious love - especially in terms of the core desktop User Experience! Appropriately, the rest of the list focuses a bit more on macOS 10.14 Mojave, though some of the new features like FaceTime & Safari improvements are on both iOS & macOS.

5. Enhanced Safari Privacy. Online tracking is more relentless than ever, but this year Safari brings some new weapons to the field!

For example, when you go online, your device can be identified by a unique set of characteristics like: configuration, fonts, plug-ins & more. Data companies then use these characteristics to construct a fingerprint to track your device from site to site. macOS Mojave however deploys a very clever tactic to counter this - "getting lost in a sea of clones." Mojave severely limits the information that your device gives out such as a simplified system configuration, only default fonts and plugins and more. Your Mac will essentially look like everyone else’s Mac to the data tracking companies, making it much harder for them to track you.

Doctor Strange would be proud, screenshot from Apple

4. Dynamic Desktop. This feature automatically transitions new desktop wallpapers to match the time of day. So in the morning it might have a bright wallpaper for example and as you get closer to the night, the wallpapers will shift to become darker.

Screenshot from Apple

While dynamic desktop backgrounds are not a new concept (Windows Vista Ultimate Extras - DreamScene, macOS Terminal command for setting screensaver as wallpaper), Apple did give it a more useful spin! I do think this is a cool feature that not only changes a relatively boring static wallpaper but also will leave your eyes satisfied and protected from harsh bright lights in the middle of the night.

3. A Better Finder User Experience.

A new gallery view allows you to quickly scroll through a filmstrip of your files with a big preview up top. An updated sidebar now shows metadata and provides easy access for quick actions such as rotate, make PDF, etc...

Screenshot from Apple

Quick Look - one of the most useful features ever IMHO got a serious boost with Mojave also! You can markup PDFs from quick look - without ever opening a PDF program - all from the operating system basically. But why stop at PDFs, quick look will also let you trim videos on the fly, and more. A great upgrade to the core user experience in helping you quickly manage your content ...

Screenshot from Apple

2. Desktop Stacks. Most people just use the Desktop as a dump for everything - even though this is not a best practice for organization - it sure is convenient, but the end result is a visual mess.

Desktop Stacks offers a clever workaround to this. It automatically collects and sorts all your desktop files by type into stacks. So for example, all your images are automatically pulled into the image stack - but it only takes up the space of 1 icon. Click on the stack and it expands to show all your images. So now you can be lazy and organized, a great win!

Screenshot from Apple

I should note that there was this software for windows called Fences made by Stardock, which had a similar concept. It would basically draw a “fence area” on your desktop and put all your certain file types into that specific “fence area”. I do think the Mojave solution is a bit more refined though since it takes up less space but at the tap of a button it flies out to show everything. macOS has had the concept of “stacks” for folders for years - but implementing into the Desktop - I think is the optimal solution.

And Now A Drum Roll Please For # 1!

1. FULL SYSTEM WIDE DARK MODE. YES!! A full blown system wide dark mode has been quite the unicorn for many years now. A system wide dark mode not only arguably looks cool, but it’s also quite soothing on your eyes and brain at night and in a lot of cases, it really helps the content to stand out - the OS elements just blend into the background.

There have been many “hacks” over the years that would give a system dark mode to macOS, Windows, or Linux. But these workarounds would either break after a major update or something else would come up, which would bring you back to square 1. And yes there are tools like f.lux or Night Shift which reduce the bright lights of the screen at night, but a full blown system level dark mode where all the OS UI elements switch color is a much more elegant solution!

Behold Dark Mode - in all it's glory, screenshot from Apple

iOS 12 could have benefitted heavily from this feature as well, but maybe a jailbreak solution will patch us over ...

Well I guess this is a wrap for now. All the usual disclaimers apply. This is only a sample of the features that got announced - I just liked these the most - and I don't really care about Animojis 😂 These features and more will make their way to the public in the fall. I do wish WWDC offered a bit more on the hardware side but overall I enjoyed it quite a bit!

I’m going to be beta testing iOS 12 and macOS Mojave and will deliver more juicy updates in the very near future, so stay tuned! So far, I have been using iOS 12 for a few hours and I really like it actually - I have not felt this way about iOS for quite some time actually! I’m glad to see that Apple is starting to turn things around for the better again ...