WWDC 2024

And just like that, WWDC week has come and gone…

As expected, there were plenty of announcements across all OSes, both user-facing and technical - including the big one on Apple Intelligence. I don’t think there were many surprises this year.

I won’t go into details on the announcements as many people are already doing that, but I do want to point you to a few interesting resources:

• What’s new in Swift 6.0? – Hacking with Swift Blog post from Paul Hudson on the changes in Swift 6.0, covering of course the big focus on concurrency as well as many small additions throughout the language.
• The Swift 6 migration guide on swift.org Guide from the Swift team on migrating to the new Swift 6 language model, mainly focusing on concurrency.
• What’s new in SwiftUI for iOS 18 – Hacking with Swift Blog post from Paul Hudson, this time on all the changes Apple in bringing to SwiftUI.
• WWDC24: Key Updates for macOS Development with SwiftUI YouTube video from Karin Prater going over some new stuff for macOS development, which is nice given the focus is mostly on iOS/iPadOS. Covered updates include customisations for windows behaviour and styling, keyboard and mouse pointers modifiers and changes to TabView.

Apple released all the betas (although some key features will be coming later in the year) on Monday evening, and the session videos were made available progressively throughout the week.

Unless you were lucky enough to have a golden ticket and attend the conference in Cupertino or one of the many community events in the area, many people spent their time watching the released videos and testing out some of the new features.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of professional obligations during that week and couldn’t dedicate as much time to WWDC as I would have liked. So, make sure to clear your calendar during that week – even if you’re staying at home, it should be a conference week.

However, one thing I did manage to fit in was the labs. I think this is a fantastic opportunity offered by Apple that’s often overlooked by many developers. Before COVID, you had to be physically present in California to benefit from them, but now that they’re remote, everyone can participate. You just need to be quick – as soon as the sessions are announced on Monday evening, book the ones you’re interested in, as some of them become unavailable quite fast.

This is your chance to have one-on-one sessions (I even had two engineers answering my questions in one of the calls) with the engineers who developed the tech you’re using. In addition to being super competent, they’re also really approachable and happy to help – even with basic questions. They’re also eager to learn what you’re doing with the stuff they worked on.

And it doesn’t have to be just questions about this year’s tech – I collected questions about things I was working on during the year that didn’t work as expected or where the code I ended up with didn’t make a lot of sense. Just come prepared as much as you can, in addition to helping you make the most of your limited time (30 minutes per session), it’s also a matter of respecting the time of the engineer helping you.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, I want to thank the engineers at Apple for all their hard work in developing great tools and technologies – and for taking the time to interact with developers during the labs and help bring their ideas to life.

And as a conclusion, here is my checklist for next year’s WWDC:

• During the year, keep track of questions or items worth discussing during the labs
• As soon as Apple announces WWDC, clear out my agenda for that week
• As soon as the labs are announced, book all sessions that interest me