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Join me on a journey exploring the ups and downs of being a creator. I make things across many mediums including apps, games, and podcasts. Along the way, I take the side roads to motivation and inspiration. Navigating the winding paths that try to stop us from achieving our dreams and goals.
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. Yes.
Peter:It is here. If you are a developer on Apple platforms, you know it is the WWDC conference week. It's finally here. Some surprises, some things that are always obvious, right? I'm just going to talk about it a little bit here.
Peter:I'm not going to get into details. I'll be doing that on some other podcasts that I am guesting on and I'll probably put out an episode or two of my own podcasts. But in this one, we're just going to go through some of the highlights here because I think they're worth talking about. So the big push is this year is really on bug fixing, performance tweaks, all of those kind of things. No massive new features in Apple's platforms.
Peter:Those of you that have been listening for a while, every so often I like to see years where they're just, we're gonna go back and fix the stuff. Right? We're gonna make stuff better as opposed to some silly feature that the product department came up with to ship a few more units, right? So this makes me happy. We're gonna see a big update to glass this year, the liquid glass, which as you all know I have never been a fan of.
Peter:But they have tweaked it this year and one of the things that I like about it is you can adjust essentially the transparency of things. Think it's the best way to describe it. You can go from the fully clear glass effect and this is on all of their OS's to a fully tinted version, which basically means I'm going to switch mine to the fully tinted version and leave it there. It's as simple as that. Right, there's one funny little thing on the iPhone that is a big deal for me, maybe for some of the others out there too, which is you can now independently set the volume for alarms, which is a huge deal for me because either I never hear my alarm because of the settings on the phone or it's ridiculously loud because of the settings on the phone.
Peter:So I'm actually glad that I can set that independently. Looking forward to that later in the year. I should stress, as always, none of this stuff becomes technically officially released for the public until the fall, but as developers we get access to the beta ones today. Right? Something else worth noting that is a big deal for me, always bugged me.
Peter:On the Mac, the UI, the liquid glass, just takes up way too much space. It just wastes way too many pixels. For example, the glass sidebar. If you use apps that have a sidebar, things like notes or whatever it may be, it hangs out there, right? And it's slightly indented from the left and top and bottom, and it's just wasting space.
Peter:I guess they finally realized this, and it'll actually be removing that space and up against the edge of the window, which is the way it should always have stayed because it just made sense. Just my opinion. Alright? From a developer's perspective, this is actually, I think, a pretty, pretty substantial year for as far as love to Xcode in particular, but also as far as APIs. We're gonna get these new foundation models and I should stress this is a lot of Siri talk this year which as we all know Apple's AI and Siri has been a joke for a few years right?
Peter:And this year they finally accepted maybe we're not the best at this. So Google's Gemini is being integrated into all these things. Now don't freak out because this will be on device, right? So it's not oh Google's gonna get privacy thing right? Plenty of reasons to not like Google but this will be on device like it has been previously but it will incorporate Gemini so that that hopefully is going to solve a lot of the ridiculous problems with Siri And I'm actually looking forward to that quite a lot.
Peter:Also worth noting, this is the year we ditch Intel support. So the Mac OS '20 seven, which has a terrible name, by the way, Golden Gate. I don't know why, but to me, the macOS names only work when they're one word for the most part. So macOS Golden Gate just I don't know. It doesn't work for me.
Peter:Anyway, it is important because we are dropping Intel support on Mac this year and that's a deal right there. Now interestingly, the new version of Xcode has been going this way as well, but Xcode 27 is really the one that's okay it's going to be Apple silicon support forget Intel. Which I think Apple has been more than generous as far as how they've said look we're supporting Intel for a while, but this year that's it. We're done. Now an important factor there is that Xcode they mentioned the Xcode download is 30% smaller because of the removal of Intel support.
Peter:That I think is quite interesting. Of course, it's humorous too in some ways. Like last year when they said Mexico 26 is significantly smaller, which was not really completely accurate because, yes, the original download of Xcode is smaller, but then it downloads the simulators separately. So it's not really smaller, but this year it'll be approximately 30% smaller because of no Intel support. Talking about Xcode, of course, there's a lot of AIA updated integrations and stuff.
Peter:Not going to go into too many details here, but something that stood out to me, which sounds like a small thing, but for many of us it's a deal. Apparently you will be able to set a different Xcode theme per project which I think is great. I've seen this and I've used it in other IDEs and things like that And it's really good to say, okay. I know what project I'm in. So for example, I use it with a lot of web stuff or environments.
Peter:So I know that it's like, okay. This is the production environment because it's red. I know this is the development environment because it's yellow. Right? Those kind of things.
Peter:So it sounds like a small thing, but for those of us that like that kind of stuff to, like, okay. I'm in a danger zone here. It's red. Right? Those kind of things.
Peter:That's important, I think, as that's a deal worth talking about. I've already played a little bit with Xcode 27. I like some of the changes to the settings as far as being able to configure themes and fonts and everything else which has always been a massive pain in the butt. It's a little bit easier. It's not fantastically easy but it's a little bit easier.
Peter:That's it really. The themes this year like I say is a lot of AI of course, a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements, all the things that I wanted to hear AI, we knew we were getting it anyway But also a lot of trust and safety stuff, as they call it, which is things like better controls over accounts and device usage for children, which I do think is a big deal, I'm happy to see that. It's not something I need to use, but lord knows we need better controls on just in general on everything for kids these days and what they're exposed to. So I'll be talking about other stuff like I say in other episodes and other podcasts and I'll point you to those when the time comes. But I wanted to put out some initial thoughts because I'm actually surprised at how many things this year I think that I liked compared to previous years where it's, doesn't seem like a lot.
Peter:And if you're not a developer, yeah, lot of this probably doesn't seem like a lot, but there's a lot of under the hood stuff that's going to be very helpful for us. That's it folks. If this has been helpful, you know what to do. Tell someone about it. Leave a review.
Peter:Greatly appreciate that. And with that, I'll speak to you in the next episode.