Tao of Mac

Jun 2nd 2014 · 2 min read · #apple #opinion #wwdc

WWDC 2014

My take on this year’s WWDC in a nutshell: Incremental improvements galore, with a touch of disillusionment.

All in all, it was a logical progression from , further narrowing the feature gap between ’s platforms and the competition’s – by which I mean that their borrowing of other platform’s UX is being done with their characteristic polish.

And I’m not just being cynical – I’ve been writing on and off about tech for over a decade, and literally everything Craig Federighi presented fell into two categories:

  • stuff that was obviously long overdue ( drive, storage providers, family account management, betas, etc.)
  • stuff I’ve already used on (interactive notifications, intents, third-party keyboards, etc.)

That’s it. I don’t want to diminish the engineering involved in bringing these about, but they’re simply not that novel. Yosemite looks nice, too, but it’s just not… interesting enough.

HomeKit and HealthKit don’t quite fit the above definitions, but I see them as market enablers – both tackle businesses that nobody has really cracked yet, and ’s huge developer community will bang at them until viable solutions emerge.

Technically, there were only two things of interest to me: Metal (and whatever other ways there are to leverage the GPU, besides those which are sure to be useful in ) and CloudKit (which looks like it’s borrowing a page off Azure in terms of providing a back-end enabler), so I’ll be looking into either as time permits.

The Swift Elephant (In The Room)

As to Swift… Seriously? I learned on a , but am not sorry to see it being replaced. It’s nice in its own way, but carries too much baggage.

I don’t think I’ll have any sort of problem learning Swift and see the point of bringing a -like1 development experience to , but I keep wondering why they feel the need to have vertical integration at the language level – it’s like training captive developers, even if the language does seem a little more mainstream.

But yes, color me unimpressed. I have other interests right now, and I think one of my tweets from tonight (which seems to have been rather popular) sums up my views rather neatly:

So let me see if I got this straight: uses proprietary tech, can’t make up their minds, and uses ECMA standards.

Kind of fitting that I gave away my iPad 3 yesterday, really – but I’m getting ahead of myself here, and will eventually write about that at length.

  1. It actually reminds me a lot of , including the near-instant compilation that makes the REPL possible. In fact, the most interesting thing about it for me is the playground, which is a cunning mix of marketing and productivity tool. ↩︎