WWDC has come to an end. It was an exciting week full of new stuff to make users happy and our work more productive. It’s time for a small subjective summary.

Keynote

After the keynote, I had a feeling that there were not that many new features presented, but nothing really spectacular. This year’s updates revolve around polishing and improving existing features. It seems we need to wait until 2022 for some new big things.

Okay, one moment during the keynote made me say “wow!” - Universal Control. The demo was very cool, and I can’t wait to play with it myself.

Async/Await, Structured Concurrency, actors

This year’s WWDC will be known among developers as “the one with async/await”.

This is a huge deal. I love how easy writing concurrent and asynchronous code became. I’m looking forward to using it in my projects and learn more about it.

However, it’s also a bittersweet release. It’s a bit disappointing that those new, awesome features will be available only in the latest operating systems - iOS/iPadOS 15 & macOS 12. If you want to learn more about the reasons behind this decision, check out this discussion on the Swift Forums.

SwiftUI

This year was another good year for SwiftUI. After two years since the first announcement, Apple managed to address many issues and add many improvements requested by the community. It looks to me that SwiftUI is ready for prime time. I’m going to invest some time in learning it. SwiftUI, here I come!

Markdown

New iOS has native markdown support, finally! It is now possible to initialise NSAttributedString with markdown and use it in UIKit components. Additionally, we got a new type, AttributedString, which provides a much nicer interface and uses features from the latest swift releases (key paths, dynamic member lookup). What’s even nicer, the new type is supported by SwiftUI components. Nice!

The new Playgrounds app in iOS 15

… or as I call it - Xcode little 😂

I’m looking forward to testing it. I’m hoping it will prove to be a handy tool. Having a proper editor and fast compiler to play with Swift code on iPad would be very handy.

Other news

  • ARKit being constantly improved. Not really my field of interest, but I’m amazed by all those cool demos that others have built.
  • New look in Xcode 13 and a bunch of performance improvements related to compilation times. Too soon to tell how much it will improve the compilation time of my projects, but I’m sure excited. Finger crossed.
  • Automatic module imports from the editor!!! The direction of change looks very promising. Maybe Xcode will be finally given refactoring tools that are actually usable? 🤞
  • Xcode Cloud - hmm, nice. Probably it won’t replace existing CI/CD systems in big organisations, but it can be a really good option for solo developers / small mobile teams. There is a niche for this kind of products. Especially when they come from Apple with nice, seamless integration with the Xcode!
  • New iPadOS widgets (similar to iOS). I love the new extra-large size.
  • New multitasking switcher on iPadOS - a step in the right direction, but it still feels like there is room for improvement in usability. Such amazing hardware limited by its software.

Well, these are my main takeaways from this year’s WWDC 2021. There are probably a few other things worth mentioning, but I’m still catching up on the recordings :)