60: Automated Monkeys

In the wake of WWDC, the couch discuss their favourite sessions and lab experiences, and some of the answers to the questions they had following the keynote. Ben and Jake start by sharing some of their highlights from the labs at WWDC. They both explain some of the issues they took to the engineers, and the responses they got in talking them talking over. This leads into a discussion about Radar, especially in contrast with Google’s more open bug reporting tool. Everyone agrees that there are giant holes in Apple’s tool, and Jelly’s actually convinced we might see something change next year. Jake mentions at this point that he’s excited about the current focus from Apple on education, even in things as small as being able to run apps on device without having to be a paid developer. Jelly is quick to point out that there’s a lot of evidence that Apple has being thinking about education for at least a couple of years now. From here, Jelly asks Ben and Jake to name their favourite sessions from the conference. Ben’s is the session on protocol-oriented programming, while Jelly really liked the session on the new system font, and the thought that has gone into typography on the platform. Jake, who also liked Ben’s pick, settles for one about new features in playgrounds. Moving along, Jake talks a little about his experiences playing with CloudKit and CloudKit JS, coming to the conclusion that it’s still missing some crucial features, such as its lack of shared data and it’s lack of ability to run scheduled tasks. Jelly then brings up Bitcode, which is something that Apple really hasn’t explained very much at all. Jelly cites an article he’s read which explains both what Bitcode is, and some of the reasons Apple might be interested in it. Ben’s not convinced that it’s going to work as expected, however, since it just seems too magical. Finally, Jelly brings up to odd occurrence of a couple of presenters who made a big deal about using first-party frameworks, most notably Core Data. This leads to a conversation about Core Data vs. Realm and what they actually are and why you would choose something other than Core Data for data storage.