This is my first WWDC. It’s a long week with little surprise and lots of learning.

The overall quality and quantity of the sessions are well designed and presented. However, the best talks delighting my whole experience at WWDC are from lunchtime speakers.

“Think Audacious” given by Debbie Sterling at Wednesday lunchtime is about her amazing entrepreneurial journey with GoldieBlox. Her story showed me how amazing and powerful it could be when you truly committed yourself to a dream that is bigger than yourself. It blows my mind that the ideas coming from great purpose have such natural power. I wish all the best to Debbie Sterling and her GoldieBlox. The GoldieBlox’s toys is certainly in my shopping list for my daughter.

“How to Discover a Planet: An Evolution of Search and Discovery” by Mike Brown is another inspiring talk. I heard about Pluto was not a planet anymore, but I didn’t realize there was so interesting story about why Pluto is not a planet. In this talk, Mike went through history of searching and discovering planets in our solar system and revealed how close we’re at reaching the new 9th planet. The future of searching and discovering new planets will use massive data sets from giant telescopes. LSST, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will make the full resolution, full depth image data available to download for everyone in the world when it starts operating.

I wish I could find videos of these talks, because I missed Thursday one “Making Magic: Creative Imagination Meets Technological Innovation” by Floyd Norman.

Among all of other talks, I like the design related topics. The best one is Designing for Future Hardware, which follows the theme of last year’s Prototyping:Fake It Till You Make It. The first time I learned prototyping techniques is reading book Don’t Make Me Think. Later I observed Luke Barrett used these techniques in the user interviews for early feedback of designing Mingle user interface. Apple’s designers have really pushed the boundaries of prototyping for design. The “make - show - learn” loop seems a simple concept and easy to learn, and the well designed talk with a fun example really helps you to use these techniques in your product design.

The biggest surprise to me on this WWDC is coming from Apple will enable native Watch app by upgrading watchOS. I thought Apple Watch app is just an extension of iPhone, at least for the first generation. However, we probably can expect to see more of these kind of improving, because Tesla is going to deliver their auto-steering feature by software upgrading. Although native Watch app is coming, I still think Watch app is an extension of iPhone app. In other words, Watch app can be huge user experience improvement of your iPhone app. As “Designing for Apple Watch” mentioned:

  1. Personal Communication
  2. Holistic Design
  3. Lightweight Interaction

Watch app lives in a totally different environment which has huge constrains and advantages comparing with iPhone app. I’m also amazed of how well Apple prepared for educating and helping future Watch app development:

  1. The whole design section sessions are either about Watch app design or related to Watch app design. There are more than 11 sessions (just counting sessions have “Watch” in its name) talking about every aspect of Watch app development.
  2. New system font “San Francisco” is designed for Watch, which removes fundamental block of designing on small screen.
  3. Handoff feature connects all of iOS devices. This is truly powerful feature for Watch app, which enables developers follow Apple’s design principles and clears blocks of building less on Watch app.

Swift language is another hot topic on WWDC. The new version has lots of improvement, but it gets more complex syntax. I like Swift language for its clean syntax comparing to Objective-C, but it’s a little buggy in version 1. I hope version 2 will have more reliable foundation.

Apple Design Awards is a highlight of WWDC. It is amazing to learn that so many small teams build beautiful and great applications. Giving Workflow app Apple Design Awards for their thorough support for iOS’s accessibility features is another surprise.

Someone really cares about accessibility!