WWDC 2014 | Lesson Learned
What can we learn from this year World Wide Developers conference in relation to Apple’s product pipeline, its culture and the history of the Mac? Its hard to imagine but Apple along with Adobe, Google and even Facebook began as a pipe dream on some kids garage/college door-room. As Tim Cook took the stage on Monday morning 6/2/2014, Wall Street was hard at work speculating during the event. And certainly at the end of the keynote, the stock had taken a dramatic downturn as analyst where hoping for either a bigger iPhone6 or iWatch announcement from Mr.Cook. However, I believe Apple’s product pipeline is the strongest its ever been in 25 years. And the value of its stock has always been a poor indicator of measurement and innovation. (IMHO)
Is hard to put into perspective the magnitude of the announcements for both consumers and developers of the platform. For developers, Apple introduced a new set of modern technologies and APIs never before seen. Allowing third party vendors access to even more control of the hardware when developing apps. Consumers will see new and revolutionary applications for both the Mac and iOS in areas related to health, the cloud and games.
One of the most remarkable slides from the keynote presentation came when Mr.Cook mentioned the adoption rate for iOS vs Android in rightfully calling it for what it is:
“Android fragmentation Is Turning Devices Into A Toxic Hellstew Of Vulnerabilities”
—Adrian Kignsley-Hughes
—ZD.net
Android on the other hand, has only 9% of users on its latest OS named KitKat which opens a major vulnerability flaw. As most Android users cannot get needed security patches and updates. Most Android users are walking around with a mobile OS which has not been updated in close to four years. That is ancient greek history in relation to technology updates.
iOS7, (the current mobile operation system) has received a 97% overall customer satisfaction rate and has maintained a commanding 89% of is install base upgrading to the latest version of the OS. Not to mention Apple’s commanding sale figures from its retail chain stores:
- 800 Million iOS devices
- 160 Million iPod touch devices
- 500 Million iPhones
These staggering numbers are both majestic, impressive and command a deeper investigation at the upcoming product pipeline. If we take a closer look at the upcoming iOS8 which introduces a new set of APIs (Application Program Interface) and services. Allowing app developers the ability to create new and exiting category of apps never before seen. New technologies like Photokit, Touch ID, HealthKit and CloudKit will revolutionize how we use our mobile devices. In the game space iOS8 will introduce SceneKit, SpriteKit and Metal. Technology improvements making it easier than ever to implement your games audio and graphics features.
New Technologies In iOS8 | At A Glance
Apple’s own web site describes some of the new technologies in iOS8 as follows:
Touch ID: Your app can now use Touch ID to authenticate a user before accessing some or all content in your app. Fingerprint data is protected and never accessed by iOS or other apps.
PhotoKit: PhotoKit provides new APIs for working with photo and video assets, including iCloud Photos assets, that are managed by the Photos app, so your app can edit photos directly in the Camera roll without having to import them first. Key features include a thread-safe architecture for fetching and caching thumbnails and full-sized assets, requesting changes to assets, observing changes made by other apps, and resumable editing of asset content.
HealthKit: HeathKit allows apps providing health and fitness services to access shared health-related information in one place. A user’s health information is stored in a centralized and secure location and the user decides which data should be shared with your app.
Your app can access any shared health-related information and can provide information about the user without you needing to implement support for specific fitness-tracking devices. Information can come from devices connected to an iOS device or manual entry by the user. Think of the idea behind “the internet/web of everything”, a concept which has been highly accelerated by companies like Cisco, Google, Facebook and now Apple.
CloudKit: Leverage the full power of iCloud and build apps with the new CloudKit framework. Now you can easily and securely store and efficiently retrieve your app data like structured data in a database or assets right from iCloud. CloudKit also enables your users to anonymously sign in to your apps with their iCloud Apple IDs without sharing their personal information.
We are interested in using Photokit and Cloudkit for an upcoming app for CTTDC within the DIY magazine space for our creative community. With CloudKit, you can focus on your client-side app development and let iCloud eliminate the need to write server-side application logic. CloudKit provides authentication, private and public databases, structured and asset storage services.
— all for free with very high limits.
However, as a friendly reminder of a few limitations which have been pointed to us by John Siracusa @ATP regarding server side limit caps for user data. If you are planning on building the next Instagram I would not utilize the use of Cloudkit for obvious reasons.
We have seen the rise of third party applications such as Dropbox for some time now as Apple has been lagging to come up with a good and reliable cloud base product, until now.
If you are a game developer, iOS8 will boast several new features which will enhance how games are developed, design and deployed across a spectrum of devices. Both on mobile and on the desktop via the Mac App store. Since the inception of iOS in 2007, Apple has tried to tied in services between the Mac and iOS. I believe the upcoming OSX Yosemite for the Mac will finally bring these two camps under one unified design. Yosemite (OSX) and Safari translucent window structures UI is a close indicator of where they are headed in developing a responsive human interface “look” that will feel similar across the Mac and iOS devices.
Apple describes these new technologies in iOS8 as follows:
SceneKit: SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your apps. It incorporates a physics engine, a particle generator, and easy ways to script the actions of 3D objects so you can describe your scene in terms of its content — geometry, materials, lights, and cameras — then animate it by describing changes to those objects. SceneKit’s 3D physics engine enlivens your app or game by simulating gravity, forces, rigid body collisions, and joints. It’s also completely integrated with SpriteKit, so you can include SpriteKit assets in 3D games.
To see a preview of the powerful rendering capabilities behind SceneKit, watch the key note presentation “Zen Garden” demo to see it un full action.
SpriteKit: The SpriteKit framework adds new features to make it easier to create high-performance, battery-efficient 2D games. With support for custom OpenGL ES shaders and lighting, integration with SceneKit, and advanced new physics effects and animations, you can add force fields, detect collisions, and generate new lighting effects in your games. Xcode 6 also incorporates new shader and scene editors that save you time as you create your game. Create a scene’s contents, specifying which nodes appear in the scene and characteristics of those nodes, including physics effects. The scene is then serialized to a file that your game can easily load.
Metal: With extremely low-overhead access to the A7 GPU, Metal enables incredibly high performance for sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks that are found in traditional graphics APIs. It’s specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands. Metal offers a streamlined API, a unified graphics and compute shading language, and Xcode-based tools.
These technologies are both revolutionary, innovative and push the limits of expectation for developers who will have access to a brand new set of APIs to develop new and sophisticated mobile games. After spending several hours in deep reading mode in able to grasp the fundamentals behind these new tools in an effort to move ahead towards building our apps. Apple has made available free documentation online for designers and non programers who are in the process of designing new and exiting applications. Thus making it easy for designers and non programers to adopt the new platform.
Developing games on any platform requires the use of writing extremely complicated algorithms which take advantage of your hardware graphics. Apple has always relied of the power of Open GL as an interpreter between the hardware layer and the API tools for rendering, logic and behavior of graphic intensive applications. Metal is a game changer from a hardware engineering and software perspective which highlights the core principles behind the company’s core values:
Those Who Are Interested In Software Should Make Their Own Hardware
—Steve Jobs
A Thing Or Two About Swift
A new programing languages does not show up very often in our industry of tech savvy nerds and eloquent fellows of technology. If you have ever taken a programing class on how to use Objective C (the core language behind iOS) then Swift will feel and look familiar. As a visual creative person, programing has always been a bit of a challenge to master. Learning Objective C will take time and a bit of trial and error, but if you are serious about creating naive iOS apps, there is no choice in the matter. In a future follow up for the magazine, we will cover useful tools in areas relating to OBC compilers for those of you like us who develop desktop apps using WordPress.
Swift: Swift is an innovative new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch with concise yet expressive syntax. Writing Swift code within an Xcode 6 playground shows instant results, while finished apps are compiled into high-performance native machine code. The Swift language is fast, modern, safe, and interactive.
A great indicator for those of us with a visual creative background taking the jump towards development and programing.
We are currently working on an app for our incubator ( CTTDC ) and now have to sort of decide if we want to re write using Swift. I would imagine most developers will have to jump this road at some point for their applications moving forward. What I love thus far about the new programing language are the new visual interface elements found in Xcode in relation to class structures. Apple has made it extremely easy for non-programers to quickly get up and running thus making it more flexible, intuitive and fun to create. If you have a basic understanding in any kind of object oriented programing, Swift will not look alien.
What Does A Developer Look Like?
A Brief History Of The Mac
Our story begins on January 19th, 1983. The Flint Center at De Anza College less than a mile down the road from Apple headquarters in Cupertino CA. The event was the formal showcase of Apple’s new flagship product at the company’s annual meeting. Our version of WWDC ( world wide developers conference ). The product was a computer, of course, and it was called the “Lisa” which depending on who was doing the explaining.
Either stood for “local integrated software architecture” or was the name of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs daughter or both. Lisa sat on top of the desk and on the hardware side, Lisa featured a one button mouse. Including a 5-megabits hard drive, two floppy drives and a 12inch monochrome display. It was far and away the best well designed machine on the market during this period of time. As for peripherals, a new dot-matrix desktop publishing printing. Which featured a revolutionary “what you see is what you get” function best captured in the acronym “WYSIWYG” pronounced “whizzywig”. Meaning that for the first time, users could see on the screen what would actually show up on the printed page.
The real surprise behind Lisa came on the software side. She was the first machine to commercially made available a computer with a GUI which allow the user the ability to click, point and drag objects on a screen. Using a one pointed device instead of using DOS base text commands inside of a terminal as in the case of Windows and IBM. Again, the “desktop publishing” metaphor is taken for granted today, but in 1983, it represented a staggering breakthrough. Lisa’s desktop feature pull down menus, windows, scrolling capabilities, a trash can, a clipboard (to facilitate cut/paste) and integrated applications. Meaning that the user could move easily from one software to another.
I want to return to the concept of “local integrated software architecture” from Lisa in relation to Apple announcement behind their latest OSX, named Yosemite. With the integration between its software, hardware and cloud based architecture, Apple has finally reached the gap between unified ubiquity and software architecture. Allowing your Macs, iPhones and iPad devices the ability to be more connected to one another than ever before in history. There is almost a zen or “unified” element which is tied in between iOS and OSX that is almost staggering even to imagine. Allowing Macs, iPhones, iPad, iPod touch the ability to locally integrate Apples software (Keynote, Pages, iphoto, iMovie) using the new iCloud Drive. The promise behind the Lisa computer of 1983 has finally come full circle in the Tim Cook era.
Upcoming Changes To The MAC In OSX Yosemite:
Safari: The new, streamlined toolbar in Safari puts your most important controls at your fingertips and gives you more room for what you’re viewing. Safari also gives you faster performance and more control over your privacy.
Mail: Now Mail lets you send large attachments more easily. You can annotate documents and fill out forms right in your email messages. Faster performance means you’ll get your email more quickly, too.
Messages: If you have an iPhone, now you can send and receive both iMessage and SMS messages right on your Mac. Add people to group conversations, and remove yourself when you want. Even record short audio clips to add your voice to the conversation.
iCloud Drive: Store any type of file in iCloud and access it on any device. With iCloud Drive, you can organize your files in the cloud the way you like, create as many folders as you want, and add tags to find files faster.
These new features are a clear indicator of the original ideals and benchmark from the Lisa computer. The upcoming version of both iOS and OSX will allow the user the ability to:
- Initiate your phone call over your iPhone from the Mac, using your PC as a big speaker phone. Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrated this capability on stage at WWDC by placing a phone call from OS X Yosemite to new Apple hire Dr. Dre.
- Start an email or SMS message on the iPhone and pick up immediately on the Mac. The new feature called Handoff instantly synchs between them. For instance, Federighi demonstrated composing an email on an iPad, but want to attach a photo stored on your Mac hard drive, you simply pick up where you left off on the Mac, attaching the file.
- Airdrop between iOS and OS X – a long requested feature for people who use both platforms.
- Instantly create a hotspot link with your iPhone with no configuration required. When there is no other internet connection available, your Mac will give you the option to instantly connect through your iPhone’s 3G or 4G connection. There’s no need to enter a password or fiddle with your iPhone or Mac settings. The devices know each other and do all the configuration work behind the scenes. A feature even (hot blondes) under any hot spot will hopefully be able to understand.
These new services across the entire company from hardware, software, games and the cloud will set the company forward for the next 20 years. Finally catching up with Google and Dropbox in one monumental infinite loop.
Next Steps:
Creative Think Tank DC began as a pipe dream ideal back in the Summer of 2002. Finally setting up shop in NJ in the fall of 2010 as a startup incubator for creative professionals and visual artist. Our goals, company culture and sense of importance is derived from our values in how we work with our DIY social community.
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