Earlier today I hosted Coder Radio with Chris Fisher of Jupiter Broadcasting and in the episode we discussed my reactions as a developer to the WWDC keynote this year (2012). First things first. I did not attend WWDC nor have I installed the iOS 6.0 developer release, so some of my information may be incomplete; I have to do this in this way due to Apple’s developer NDA. You can listen to the show to hear what I didn’t like, but I’d rather go through a few things that I would like to have seen that to my knowledge aren’t coming.
Inter-app Communications
This is by far my largest pet peeve with iOS development and using iOS. Why isn’t there are robust way for apps to work together and share data; within reason of course. Android has a version this in the form of “intents” and Windows Phone 7 has a incredibly powerful system called “contracts”. This really gets to me when I consider that iOS is a BSD system yet does not adhere to the UNIX philosophy of allowing many small applications to work together to do big things; yes, I know that iOS apps tend to be smaller in scope than their desktop counterparts but to date there is no real way for them to work together. There is so much functionality that cannot easily be done on iOS due to this restriction.
Widgets
On my Android and Windows phone I can glance at the screen and get the latest tweets, view other data (such as a stock ticker), and play a song, or begin or pause listening to an audiobook. On iOS, almost all of those things require me to launch separate apps. That’s silly not to mention a bad user experience. I know there are definitely battery life concerns if you have too many widgets open, but there is no reason that Apple can’t add some sort of restricted mode for simple widgets to run in.
Siri integration
Ever since I got my hands on my 4S I have been waiting for a full Siri API. Apple has been working on it, but to date there is no fully functional Siri API for third party developers. This is understandable given how often Siri simply does not work but it is still a shame.
That’s all for now. Now I can finally take a look at the dev preview! For feedback please find me on Google+ or Twitter.
