Well, it is that time of year again – when the tech space goes crazy with Apple fever and starts to have dancing iTVs and iWatches in their heads. From the Apple developer perspective, this is (like the WWDC of 2012) being preceded by increasing frustrations from the community regarding Apple’s tools but more their practices – these complaints have been grumbling under the surface and indeed I’ve been at the forefront of sounding the alarm, but some fights have already been lost and if history is any indicator the prominent Apple devs will be placated by pretty much whatever they get on Monday. Still, to be fair, if Apple could address a few core areas of developer pain, then there would be legitimate cause to celebrate.
Contracts / Intents: Windows Phone and Android both have viable solutions to interapp communication that work very well for the developer communities on those platforms, the platform vendors, and of course the end user. iOS, however, has no real solution to this problem; I don’t consider and a reasonable person would probably agree that the current URL schemes tricks are all just really sloppy hacks that should never be shipped and no sane developer would use them by choice if there were a better alternative. There is no technical reason that this can’t be done and at this point Apple’s stubbornness is doing a huge disservice to the developer community and the end user.
App Test Distribution: One of the most annoying aspects of being an Apple developer is that whenever a customer or even a teammate gets a new iOS device, we have to go through the whole rigmarole of getting the devices UUID, adding the UUID to our developer portal, regenerating a provisioning profile, and making making a whole new binary just to get that one new device into the testing pool. This is absurd. Apple for good reasons wants to limit how apps are distributed outside of the App Store but at this point, there system is too much of an inconvenience to developers (a group I strongly feel is important to their long-term success) to be tolerated one day longer. There is some hope – a few months ago Apple purchased Testflight and that suggests that they intend to streamline the test distribution system.
Mac Mini Refresh: I’ve been careful not to put oo many consumer / new product requests in these sort of posts but I am willing to make an exception for the Mac Mini. Though the mini is probably the least sexy device that Apple sells, it is extremely important for the developer community at large, as a ton of little shops are almost 100% Mac Mini shops. At this point, it is pretty hard to justify the purchase of a Mini given how old the tech in the device is and the somewhat poor value proposition – at least compared with the iMac or an equivalent Windows PC.
That’s it. I don’t think these items are too crazy but am not so sure that we are going see anything of significance in any of these areas. My guess is that we will see nothing the way of interapp communication, a half step toward an easier test distribution, and little more than a spec bump or price drop on the Mini.
If you want to troll me when I inevitably proven wrong on Monday, then please follow me on Twitter.
