Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/06/wednesday-morning-news150616/
John Gruber’s brief thoughts and observations regarding yesterday’s announcements at WWDC tell us about the much better venue for the keynote, as well as how Apple advanced each of the four platforms. The changes to Messages will have far-reaching effects beyond making everyday conversations more exciting, and Swift Playgrounds will be the foundation for a whole new generation of developers.
Another look at the four platforms from Six Colors tells us about how the changes will affect day-to-day, and on the surface, things look pretty great for the iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and now macOS platforms. There’s a little disappointment that no major iPad features were shown off on stage, though.
Ars Technica takes a look at Apple’s new file system format, APFS. It wasn’t talked about on stage, but the documentation says that it’s designed to scale on everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac Pro, and has been designed with encryption in mind as well as other features of a modern file system. APFS is currently only available as a developer preview in macOS Sierra — you can’t boot from it, nor can you back up to a Time Machine volume using it.
At the eleventh hour before the WWDC keynote, the internet discovered that Apple’s own iOS apps were appearing in the App Store. And not just the apps that were already available there, but iOS cornerstones such as Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Music, Reminders, Notes, and so on. TechCrunch wanted so hard to believe this was the beginning of Apple unbundling the native iOS apps (doing something similar to Google’s Android, and allowing them to be updated separately outside of iOS, but alas, it was not to be.
Instead, the reality was much simpler: with iOS 10, Apple now allows you to remove the built-in apps from the home screen. The Apple support article on the topic says the apps use less than 150MB all up, but for those who simply never use the apps you can remove them and re-download them from the App Store whenever they’re needed.
MacStories covers the full list of this year’s Apple Design Award winners. With none of the ADAs being macOS exclusives, it’s pretty clear where the innovation was this past year. Special mention to the Australian-developed Streaks as well as Zova for receiving ADAs.
The introduction of a Siri API for developers to tap into in iOS 10 is great news, but it’s not quite a complete free-for-all. 9to5Mac explains that Siri integration within third-party apps will be limited to six categories to begin with: ride booking, messaging, photo search, payments, VoIP calling, and workouts. Siri will ultimately decide whether to hand off to any third-party app.
The good news is, tvOS games don’t have to support the Siri Remote. Apple original wanted support for their controller so Apple TV owners wouldn’t have to go out and buy another accessory to let them play certain games, but with multiple controller support, tvOS games can now require game controllers.
IOS 10 will also include support for Cisco Spark’s VoIP APIs. It’s all part of the Apple and Cisco partnership announced in August last year, and if your company uses Cisco’s Spark cloud collaboration platform, then iOS 10 will tie into that just nicely.
Interestingly, there’s now an App Store review guidelines comic book, available for download from Apple’s App Review page. The comic helps developers understand the ins and outs of Apple’s review process, and it was made in collaboration with Madefire, a comic book reader app for iOS and tvOS.
