136: WWDC20 Goes Virtual!

hello welcome to the con for friday march 13th 2020 i'm your host even tolden and uh yeah it's been interesting time since i last recorded podcast right we are all in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and there are many implications from that but i don't want to talk about the virus itself the crisis itself i think i have had my fill of effort today but there are a lot of implications from this there's a lot of changes happening to uh i don't know how permanently there's a lot of changes happening at least for the near future about our way of life the way we're living in the way that we're conducting our business and our lives and that includes big companies like apple and how they are going to run their giant developer conference and so that's what i want to talk a little bit about today because apple announced that wwdc 2020 is their annual developer conference it's like the event for apple developers in the world uh that conference is going to occur but it's going to be online only for the first time now this comes on the heels of google canceling their in-person events related to their conference facebook doing the same for their conference just basically all the conferences getting canceled but we were waiting for apple to announce what they were doing the expectation was of course that they would do an online only event not that they were going to cancel entirely and they have done they've done that they have not given much detail though but i'm going to start this and we'll talk only probably for a little while about this because there's not a lot of information but i'm going to start by just reading all the texts that they gave us because that's how little there is and i'm going to do it in kind of like an announcer-y dramatic voice for your entertainment okay so here we go coming this summer this june wwdc20 brings a completely new online experience to millions of talented and creative developers around the world join us for a fully packed program including keynote and sessions to gain early access to the future of apple platforms and engage with apple engineers dive into an exciting learning experience and discover how to create your most innovative apps yet using the latest apple technologies stay tuned for details on the web by email and in the apple developer app okay i'm back hope you enjoyed that that was way more difficult than i thought it was gonna be kind of like kind of hurts the road so that is literally all the text that is on the page which is linked in the show notes of this podcast if you want to check it out uh the only other thing on the page is a shiny apple logo that either is showing dark mode and light mode or it's supposed to be a shimmer i think it's supposed to be like a reflective apple logo is on the back of the macbooks now i think that's what it's showing it's kind of the case to me maybe bring us new hardware interesting maybe maybe they'll announce the beginning of the transition to an rmac that'd be crazy awesome crazy too we also have some graphics here one says hello in cursive and wwc in 2020 and they're done in the style of stickers and that kind of indicates maybe we're gonna see a lot of action on the messages at front or i message because that is definitely some updating they added stickers a while back now you probably don't remember them because nobody uses them like sticker packs were a thing uh maybe this is what they're implying some major changes messages i don't know that would be great uh otherwise not really anything here one tantalizing tidbit i want to i want to try to read into the paragraph of text everybody tries to read into what apple says um it says it says in here engage with apple engineers and apple is generally very careful with the language they choose so engage with apple engineers is interesting it's not engaging right if you're just watching a wwc video like for years now all of the actual talks have been available very quickly the same day and some of them are live streamed so you can watch them that's what i've done for several years because uh i cannot afford to go over there uh but that's interesting if engaged engineers means actual engagement with them i don't know how that's gonna work like what technology platform does apple have or would they be willing to use for a third party to facilitate that kind of engagement and how would that work one of the most valuable aspects of wwc for a developer has told me that people have actually gone is the labs where you can meet with an apple engineer who actually works on the frameworks you are having trouble with and get actual advice about your code right there in person live and uh then i have actually read blog posts from developers who have gone to these lab sessions and published uh some of the results of their talks with engineers and i've actually used the the tips and the you know and the results of that live session in my own code before so these things are very valuable these live sessions they help not just the engineer directly but sometimes many other engineers like myself couldn't attend when they suddenly get written up and a blog post or something if that's appropriate so i'd be really interested to see what they can do with such a short time lines until then i mean are they just attempting to develop maybe an extension of facetime if i was gonna guess apple generally doesn't like to use like a third party framework like a third party system for this stuff i think so if i had to guess they're gonna use the time to i don't know update their facetime system their facetime software to allow for some kind of uh i don't know more conference appropriate type of engagement you know so i don't know we will see i'm not really sure i just kind of don't feel like they're gonna use zoom or something like that but if for instance they want to do a lab then how does that work if they if like the engineer on the other end can't see your screen for instance or uh you know potentially get a copy of your code you know you need some you need some kind of at least screen sharing and um maybe even file transfer somewhat you know in order to do this kind of thing i don't know well i'm excited to see though other than that there's really nothing else in there wwc is wwc i mean i'm sure there'll be a keynote and there'll be a bunch of talks about all kinds of topics and uh maybe we'll have a surprise one more thing that'd be awesome so i don't know but i am generally excited about this i wish of course this were occurring under better circumstances but i have for years watched wwc get more online focus or more more useful to people who couldn't be there and uh i think it's i'm hoping that whatever apple comes up with here works and that they continue to innovate on whatever that platform is that they use for this this year because there's just so many apple developers there's so so many developers that no matter how big they ever would make wwc it'll never be big enough for all developers want to go it'll never be affordable enough there's never going to be a single place on earth that's going to be accessible enough so the more they can make the experience valuable for developers who are remote i think the better the experience is going to be for the apple community in general so i'm all for the for them doing this i look forward to seeing what they are going to specifically implement yeah uh so there's not really a lot more to talk about it that's kind of all there is uh for now if you would like to read the page yourself uh it's in the show notes if you want to get in touch with me on twitter there's also some content information and the archive of many many past episodes of this podcast on dailyconpodcast.com uh and for now i would just say that i hope you and your family and your friends and everyone are are safe in these trying times and um i'll probably do some more of these podcasts uh especially during this this uh kind of lockdown period i'm in here for two weeks um where we're not supposed to do much mostly to close anyway so i'll probably do some more podcasts and focus on things that aren't directly coronavirus news uh because you know i said i'm kind of full of that right now i want to focus on something else okay so that's gonna be it for today as i said dailyconpodcast.com stay safe out there i'll talk to you next time later keep the lights low because it's convenient stars don't show up that way oh come on now oh come on now let me see what might be left of me and maybe i will try maybe i'll try makes no difference to me anything would be improvement over here i am here i am here i am and i used to be realize come on now come on now i can't have it so i thought what the hell do i know i hope so i don't know it's the same down another rabbit hole come on now come on now go get you come on come on now come on now come on now Thank you.