This year’s WWDC is a little weird for everyone involved. Hell, the entire year has just been weird. WWDC is still happening virtually on June 22nd and there promises to be an interesting one from a product release perspective – ARM Mac? New iMac body? Headphones? Oh my! That’s all exciting for the Apple faithful, but this is (at least in name) a developer conference, so let’s talk dev! There’s no way to know what Apple’s got up its sleeve but this is my wishlist.
Catalyst
There’s no two ways about it Catalyst needs some love if it’s going to be a real AppKit replacement and (more importantly) get those memory hogging Electron apps off our machines or at least allow us to run few then them. Currently, Catalyst has limited API support and there are gaping holes in its capabilities that make it non-viable for many complicated apps. I’d like to see this change and I’d further like to see Catalyst develop some of its own UI controls instead of leaning on AppKit.
iPadOS
With the new (overpriced) keyboard for iPad, we are seeing iPad step into that productivity role that many Trekkies hoped it would have after having seen its inspiration aboard the enterprise for a few decades. Unfortunately, iPad is still hobbled by iOS, an operating system that was made primarily for phones. Apple has been taking steps in the right direction on this for some time, even going as far as to christen iOS on iPad “iPadOS.” For the most part that’s just semantics, but it could be so much more. iPad and iPadOS should break the shackles of iPhone and become a real competitor to productivity tablets like the Surface Pro. This will require more cross app and cross process APIs being made available to third party developers and Apple being willing to allow it’s community of passionately driven developers to leverage these tools in novel and unexpected ways.
Swift UI
My brief dalliances with SwiftUI have more or less been pleasant, but there’s always a point where it’s either not possible or (probably more accurately) just a huge pain in the rear to get something expressed in Swift UI that would have been simple in Interface Builder. Apple’s already done a lot great work with the UI preview for Swift UI. Now, it’s time to build upon that by extending that technology to create a new generation of Interface Builder that always Swift UI layouts to be WSYWIG edited.
That’s my wishlist for WWDC 2020. If you have any iOS development you need done, I have some bandwidth available for July at The Mad Botter INC. Let me know what you think on twitter and subscribe to my podcast.
