A long list of short thoughts about things announced at WWDC (2020)
Apple announced a lot of new things for their platforms at WWDC. Let’s turn them into a list, complete with quick reactions.
Overall
Kinda wish Tim Cook opened with “Hey there”.
Hearing a room full of people cheer about setting default email and browser apps would’ve been something.
Nothing on my wish list was announced because my wishes are, again, too brave.
Whole lot of nice steps forward for mature OS platforms.
iOS 14 and iPadOS 14
iOS 14: What if Android looked nice?
App Library: Just let me default to the alphabetised list, like a civilised person.
App Clips: Can’t wait to be reminded they exist next year.
App tracking controls and privacy info: Love it.
Memoji: Still hard to believe that we don’t have the technology to make a hug emoji that doesn’t look like someone smiling at and backing away from a mugger.
Messages: All the changes would’ve been great if my main group chats hadn’t migrated to Discord a while ago.
Pinned conversations: Legitimately handy. No more scrolling through acres of spam messages to find people I only ignore by accident.
Emoji search: And there was much rejoicing.
Widgets: My obsessive tinkering with my home screen just got more complicated.
Compact UI: Phone and FaceTime calls look great, as goes picture-in-picture.
Compact Siri: Now it won’t take over my screen when Siri decides to pop up for no good reason at all. Hooray.
Default email and browser apps: Cool. Just means I’m going to spend hours researching new email apps again.
Translate: Fun.
Maps: Lots of great stuff that might come to Australia eventually.
Maps guides: Clever way to add useful content without relying on crowd sourcing, a la Google Maps.
Car Keys: Can’t wait for my partner to tell me we’ll never get a car with this.
Apple Music: Changes look positive. I’ll have inexplicably strong feelings about all of this once I can play with it all.
Scribble: This will be a real “what, I couldn’t always do this?” feature once it drops.
macOS: Big Sur
macOS: Huge Unit.
macOS: Self-Aware Name We Hope You Meme.
macOS: We Fucking Love Mountains.
Notification centre: “We think it’s good now, guys, seriously.”
UI changes: “How many synonymous do you have for ‘sleek’?”
UI changes: Lots of nice changes I’ll stop noticing quickly but will miss if I go back to an older version of macOS.
Control centre: Makes sense. Seems fine.
Safari password monitoring: Getting closer to being a decent iPassword replacement for me.
Safari privacy report: Love it.
Macs and “Apple silicon”
Can’t wait to see this evolve. And to read more about it from people who know a lot more about this than me. The transition should be finished right around the time I’m looking for a new computer. Convenient.
tvOS 14
watchOS 7
Sleep tracking: How long until Apple releases a watch band designed especially for sleeping in?
Sleep app: This looks like a nice evolution of some features that were already pretty okay.
Charge notifications: Clever and helpful.
New watch faces: Can’t wait for the yearly “They can’t make nice faces” takes.
Complications: Should be fun.
Fitness workouts: Reminds me that I really need to clean out my workout list.
Hand washing: Cute headline that probably won’t amount to much in the short term. Clever tech, though.
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