Today Apple held the latest developer's conference keynote, for the first time - online. Here are the few key announcements from the conference:

iOS 14

UI:

• App Library - automatic app organization on the home screen
• Widgets can be not only on the today screen, but on the home screen, in different sizes
• Picture in picture - floating videos on home screen

Siri:

• Siri not blocking the whole screen anymore :)
• Translate app

iMessage:

• Pinned conversations
• New Memojis
• Inline replies
• Group conversations improvements

Maps:

• Guides (what's around / recommendations)
• Cycling
• EV routing

CarPlay:

• Unlock and start 2020 BMW 5 series from an iPhone
• Use U1 chip to do that from further distances than NFC

App Store:

• App Clips - fast and lean (<10MB) apps accessible via QR codes / NFC

iPadOS 14

• Improved photos app
• Sidebars, top toolbar controls (hello Finder)
• Improved iPad apps layout
• No more full screen blocking calls, on iPhone as well (only the incoming call notification or during the call as well?)
• Mac-like global floating search everywhere
• Scribble (handwriting recognition)
• Change default mail and browser apps

AirPods

• Automatic switching
• Spacial audio

watchOS 7:

• Rich complications
• Watch face sharing
• Better navigation directions
• New workout modes
• Sleep tracking and winddown mode
• Hand washing detection

Privacy:

• Upgrade other accounts to Sign in with Apple
• Approx. GPS location
• Camera/microphone usage indicator
• Data usage disclosure in the App Store
• Safe home devices

HomeKit:

• Automized routines
• Easier setup of new devices
• Adaptive lighting for smart bulbs
• Extended smart cameras setup

tvOS 14:

• Show those smart cameras on the TV
• Multi user support for gaming
• Picture in picture
• 4k AirPlay
• New TV show announcement :)

macOS (Big Sur):

• New UI and icons
• Control center
• Widgets, notifications center
• Improvements to Messages
• Improved Maps.app
• More capabilities in Mac Catalyst

Safari:

• Privacy reports
• Customizations
• Safe extensions
• Tracker prevention
• Built-in translation

Apple silicon:

• Universal binaries
• Rosetta 2 emulation
• Virtualization
• App Store apps support
• Developer Kit based on Mac Mini
• 2 years transition, new hardware this year

1.5 years after, but better late than never

Few weeks ago I jumped into the Samsung Store to see the recently presented S20 (don't care about the +), S20 Ultra and Z Flip as well as maybe, just maybe have a glimpse on the Fold, released almost a year ago!

The S20 is nice, and despite the renewed cameras and updated design I was mostly interested in the improved display, which now supported 120Hz refresh rate albeit on a lower screen resolution. In short: those 120Hz look fabulous, not sure why Samsung has the higher resolution 60Hz mode by default though. You can't see the difference between 1440p and 1080p, but the difference between 60 and 120 Hz is much more noticeable. The hogher refresh rate looks so smooth that I now want to have it on my daily phone as well. Too bad Samsung's software is far from that screen smoothness - I've experienced stutters in their stock Camera, Photos apps..

Enough with the S20. Fast forward to yesterday when I was passing their store again, I noticed they added something new for display.

First I saw the S20 Ultra with its Ultra-sized camera bump:

Immediately I tried the advertised 100x zoom just to realize that it's not that great and no magic's happening:

Other than the bigger camera bump, a bit better specs, battery and size, the S20 Ultra is no much different to the regular S20 and S20+.

Next what I noticed was the new Z Flip, laying there, open for use! I grabbed it and of course started folding/unfolding it immediately:

First bending a screen felt very weird, In a second or two it felt so natural like if I would have done it for a long time now. And it felt cool, something phones didn't feel for a while.

I overheard the salesman telling other customers that both the Z Flip and the Fold are pre-ordered for months, despite being one of the most expensive phones on the market, which means folding phones are hot, ignoring their immaturity and downsides, and downsides there is. As mentioned by many, the Z Flip is unusable while folded, because the tiny screen fits only notifications and for every operation, unlike the Fold you have to unfold it. Also the screens, they are delicate. Very. From what I've been told, the Z Flip has been on display only for a single day, and it already had scratches from fingernails all over the display. But the screen itself actually looked quite well, the crease was not that visible, although I definitely felt it while moving my thumb across it. The tactile feel of moving your finger around this plastic-y screen is very close to glass. But its long-term durability is still under question, that's probably why the Fold is kept in a glass cube for now..

Also I really liked the feeling of the Z Flip's hinge - it feels sturdy and solid and stops at many angles. Maybe for now folding a phone doesn't have a lot of practical sense all the time, but it definitely feels cool and novel doing it. It would be interesting to see what the competitors, with more polished software will bring to the table, especially when the technology matures, the screen will be less delicate and cheaper to manufacture, overall bringing the currently high price down. I'm actually looking forward to a future like this.

The recently announced news about Microsoft's Fluent Design (FD) are pretty scarce, so I had to look into their official docs to understand what's FD all about.

Previously Microsoft created a visual framework which they used for web and Windows apps internally which then they expanded and are now sharing with the global audience. The most noteworthy use of FD is apparently Microsoft Office's apps for mobile.

The problem (except the framework's name Fabric, I thought they bought Twitter's and then Google's crash reporting system, ugh) is that this is just a UI framework, like the unofficial material design (not by Google who created Material design) UI framework for iOS.

FD is NOT a cross-platform runtime framework like React Native (written with ReactJS) or Flutter (written in Dart), but it's just a UI framework for iOS (written in Swift) and Android (Kotlin) which you can use in your apps.

So if you're a fan of Microsoft's buttons or their pickers you can go for it, but since most of current apps are using either stock iOS or Android UI elements or some own custom designs instead, I can't see much use of FD just yet.

Also currently their github repo has only a single issue with a question about FD's roadmap which is now unanswered. Maybe the answer will provide any notable information on the future of the framework but at least for now it's really hard to evaluate its worth, especially at this early stage.

If you ended up here, know that this was a tough one 🙂

If you're using Carthage and already cleaned all the embedded frameworks and "Copy Bundle Resources", cleaned the project and removed Derived Data, and none of your verbose logs were helpful, here's what helped me:

It turns out you put only static libraries into your input.xcfilelist and output.xcfilelist files. My problem was that somehow I added there a recent Firebase's dependency - the AppAuth.framework thinking it's neccessary to be stripped down before uploading to the App Store. Turns out its not and removing it from the aforementioned files actually solved the issue.

P.S. This helpful SO post explains how to understand which of your libraries are static and which are dynamic.

What was revealed today:

Services

Apple arcade

• Console-level games (didn't look like it)
• Launches sept 19 with limited amount of games
• $4.99 / mo / family
• Best (presented) games looks very basic, but the price is cheap, so...

Apple TV+

• 'See' movie trailer
• 12 show title on big screen - all new / unknown
• 1 month free trial
• 1st show launches Nov 1
• $4.99 / mo / family
• Apple TV+ free for 1 year for each new purchased device

Hardware

iPad

• New budget iPad with smart connector to support keyboard and apple pencil
• $329 regular, $299 for education
• 100% recycled aluminium

Apple watch

Saves / improves people’s lives
Participates in health research

Series 5:

• Always on display
• Compass
• International emergency calling (LTE models)
• 100% recycled aluminium
• New titanium, ceramic materials
• New Nike and Hermes models
• $399 for the GPS, $499 for cellular models
• Available Sep 20
• Series 3 price down to $199

iPhone

Budget iPhone (formerly known as XR) is now called iPhone 11, and the successor for XS and XS Max are called 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max

iPhone 11

• 6 colors
• Dolby Atmos support
• Dual camera (wide 1x and ultra-wide camera)
• Night mode
• Improved front-facing camera
• New A13 bionic chip
• Chinese company showing a GPU performance demo with their game demo
• 1h longer battery than on XR
• Wireless charging (XR also has it)
• Wi-Fi 6
• $699 starting price (nice)

iPhone 11 Pro

• Everything iPhone 11 has plus:
• New matte finish
• New midnight green color (yikes)
• Up to 1200 nit brightness
• A13 improvements: Machine Learning, Low-Power design
• 6x faster matrix multiplication for ML, over 1 TFLOPs
• CPU cores are up to 20% faster and 30-40% lower power
• 4-5h longer battery (nice)
• 18W charger in the box
  New camera system (updated wide + telephoto and a new ultra-wide) - looks like a triclop 😏
• Simultaneous video recording from multiple lenses in pro apps
• Starts at $999 and $1099 for the bigger iPhone 11 Pro Max

Apple Retail(?)

• Custom Apple watch bands
• Trade in
• Fifth Avenue store reopening

This is actually just phenomenal. A short two-part series how a bunch of guys reverse engineered a Minecraft world seed (which has 10^64 combinations!) by looking at few let's play videos. Truely insane and very interesting to watch.

And here's the actual seed. 🤯

While working at home I have a 27" screen attached to my laptop. That's why when I'm working outside home I'm left with much smaller screen real estate and it's really nice to add at least some of it with an iPad.

I'm using Duet Display probably for few years now, but at the recent WWDC Apple announced Sidecar - using your iPad as a secondary monitor, wirelessly.

I tried it on the Mac OS Catalina beta along with my iPad running iPadOS 13 beta but still returned (at least for now) back to Duet Display.

Here's my take on advantages and disadvantages of Sidecar in comparison to Duet Display.

Pros:

• Works wirelessly (who needs wires anyway 🙂)
• Can be enabled with one click
• No 3rd party installation required
• First party solution - so works flawlessly (ignoring early Beta software bugs)
• Doesn't drain your Mac's battery if you're on it
• Touch-bar controls (if you're into that)
• Free

Cons:

• No touch events are passed - in Duet Display you can tap the screen and it would register them as mouse clicks. In sidecar this behavior is disabled. With Duet display you can draw with your finger or Apple Pencil right in Mac OS if needed (to sign documents, etc.) and with Duet Display Air and Pro extra purchases you get even more Apple Pencil functionality, transforming your iPad back into a tablet 🙂 (not the entertainment device as it is but as a drawing Wacom-like tablet). Not a big deal for me personally, but decided to share
• Resolution - and this is a big one for me. Sidecar provides less resolution (probably because wireless transmission bandwidth is limited) than Duet Display, thus the iPad fits less info, granted the info it fits is much bigger physically which can help reading smaller texts from far

So overall, Sidecar is a nice general-purpose feature which is free and easy to use. But at least for now the main issue for me is the lower resolution operation which leaves not enough physical space to put all the secondary (by value) apps onto the secondary screen. That may change, but for now I'll stick with Duet Display.

Quite interesting video on today's state of Machine Learning in Tesla. Details on their hardware and software are impressive.

The keynote actually starts at 1:09h:

Few nice introductory videos to Google's TensorFlow.

First is about the idea behind ML in general:

Next is about actual problems it's able (and is already) to solve:

Footage from April processed only now 🙂

Here are few nice talks with Apple's top managers right after WWDC:

• Interview with Doug Brooks, the Apple Product Manager about the new Mac Pro
• Interview with Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering about Apple’s new developer tools like Catalyst and SwiftUI, as well as iPadOS

And last but not least, here's an interesting interview by John Gruber with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak discussing the news from WWDC 2019:

This was a big one.

The dev conference started with a TV series announcement trailer 😑

tvOS 13

• PS4/Xbox One controller support
• New wallpapers

watchOS 6

• New watch faces
• Hourly beeping sound
• Audiobooks, voice memos, calculator
• Independent standalone apps
• Audio streaming API
• Own App Store
• Activity trends
• Noise app to monitor noise pollution
• Cycle tracking
• Health summaries
• New bands

iOS 13

• Speed improvements
• Dark mode
• Improved Safari, Mail, Notes, Reminders
• Improved Maps with Street View (SF only as usual?)
• ‘Just once’ location access option
• Sign in with Apple - private social login
• One-time email address generation
• HomeKit secure video
• iMessage avatar pictures
• Enhanced Memoji with earrings, teeth, eyeshades, etc.
• Memoji stickers
• Improvements to photo capture and post-production
• Rotate videos, filters and effects for videos
• ML to remove photo dupes and choose the best of them
• Improved Photos.app to remove clutter and let focus on important moments
• AirPods reading and replying to messages
• AirPods audio sharing
• HomePod handoff
• Siri live radio support with iHeartRadio, TuneIn, etc. 100k stations.
• Updated CarPlay
• CarPlay integration with 3rd party apps
• Neural TTS - much better sounding Siri voice

iPadOS 1?

• Much improved multitasking
• Multi-window support for the same app
• Improved Files.app
• iCloud Drive folder sharing
• SMB File sharing
• Mass Storage Device support
• External device support via usb-c
• Desktop class browsing on Safari iPad
• Download manager
• Custom fonts
• Working with text is now much easier
• Apple Pencil latency down to 9ms from 20ms
• New notes app
• PencilKit

New Mac Pro

• 28-core Xeon CPU
• 12 DIMM slots
• PCIe expansions
• Special dual-core Vega II GPU
• Custom designed video processing card
• 1.4kW PSU
• Optional wheels
• New 6k, HDR, anti-reflective, 1000 nits display
• Mac pro starts at $5999, new display at $3999/$4999

MacOS 10.15 Catalina

• iTunes now broken down into Apple Music, Podcasts and Apple TV apps
• iPhone sync moves to Finder
• Podcasts will have content search
• Apple TV 4k HDR playback on Mac
• Sidecar - wireless connectivity tablets as second screens/tablets
• Voice control
• Improved find my Mac even when it’s offline
• ScreenTime

Dev Tools

• iPad apps migration tool to Mac
• RealityKit - kit for building photorealistic scenes, includes 3d scene tools
• ARKit3 with real-time people occlusion, motion capture
• Real-world Minecraft
• SwiftUI - new UI framework written in Swift - less code, live preview in sim and device (sic!)
• Native UI framework for watchOS

It was probably the most packed WWDC I've seen. I hope all of the new stuff will be working reliably when it's out 🙂

Two years ago I supported BetterTouchTool (Mac OS tool for extended keyboard/mouse/touchpad control) with a whooping $5 😃

And today after another update out of the very many updates in the last years the developer told that the older license won't work with the latest version and you'll have to buy a new one for $6.50.

I use the app only for one single feature - long time ago I assigned three finger press on the touchpad to simulate middle click which allows me open Safari links in background tabs and close them as well by 'middle-cliking' them everywhere in the tab and not only on the small, hard to target X button.

And even though I use the app for only a small single reason, I bought the new for few simple reasons:

1. The developer was constantly updating the app through the years
2. He never even peeped about asking more than my initial $5 for all those updates
3. He still continues refining and improving the app, which means he still pours a lot of effort into the app
4. The app saved me thousands of additional clicks for those simple operations I use it for

I constantly hear people complaining about how developers are trying to rip them off. But those people forget that developers are like everyone else - they need food, shelter, provide for their families. And getting $5 in two years is far from what they need to ship a quality product on a constant basis. So even when some of them switch to subscriptions (which I don't like as anyone else) I still understand their reasoning and buy not the product itself but more and more I invest for great people constantly refining them. And I wish more people would understand that as well and appreciate the hard work done to bring us, customers those refined products we use daily.

That's why please support indie devs when that support costs you that famous cup of coffee everyone's comparing it to. Because you will drink that cup and that's it. But the piece of software you buy will make your life easier day after day.

Today was Google's dev conference, and here are the main takeaways.

General

• 'Full coverage' from Google News comes to search
• Podcasts are coming to search as well
• AR search results you can see on your phone
• Google lens shows popular dishes in the restaurant's menu
• Duplex not only will make reservations over the phone but now over web too
• Assistant will now have more personalized recommendations
• Assistant comes to Waze
• More transparency and control over privacy
• Incognito mode in Maps, YouTube

Android Q

Innovation:

• Foldable screen support & continuity
• 5G support
• Offline auto-captions for videos
• Smart Reply for IMs
• Dark mode

Security & privacy

• Privacy settings
• Reminders for location usage
• Faster security updates without device reboots

Digital well-being

• Focus mode
• Extended Parental Controls

‘Helpful home’ devices gathered under the Nest name

• Easy to use
• Personal for everyone via Google Assistant
• High privacy

Smart home:

• Nest Hub Max - touchscreen device to control your home aka Alexa with screen
• Previous Nest Hub got a discount

Google Pixel 3a and 3a XL

• Starts at $399
• Has a headphone jack
• AR maps navigation
• AI enhanced camera with Night Sight
• Unlimited Google Photos storage
• 30h stand-by time
• 3 years of updates

AI

• For researchers
• In healthcare
• To foresee floods