WWDC 2021 kicks off next week and there are a few things I am hoping to hear about. Here’s my wish list for WWDC 2020 for comparison.
- SwiftData! The mythical beast of persistence, the talk of which persists. I am hoping for something that merges the functionality of the magnificent GRBD SQLite library with native Swift. Give me all out SQL control along with ORM-like technology for those times when something more Swifty is preferred. This post by Drew McCormack has some great ideas and more realistic expectations about how SwiftData will be to CoreData as SwiftUI is to UIKit. Whatever happens, I hope we get a top quality, SQL-based, Swifty new data framework that can handle syncing across all a user’s devices.
- eyeOS! Come on, it’s the greatest name ever in Apple OS history and it’s not even been announced yet. This is something I hope to hear more about. Apple has been showing AR stuff for a few years now, but all the demos leave me underwhelmed. Someone holding an iPad while building virtual Lego is not where it’s at for me. I want to see some stuff that points to Apple’s wearables future, along with some of the indie AR demos that have been so captivating.
- Continuous Integration! Will this be the year that the BuddyBuild acquisition starts to make sense to the developers? I’d really like to see Apple introduce a streamlined CI solution that enabled us to easily write-test-commit-deploy – the deploy should be straight to the App Store and take care of…well…everything from screenshots to certificates.
- Home Automation! Recent oopsies with job adverts aside, I would love to see Apple take HomeKit and hardware on a level. I think some sort of HomePad is on its way, but perhaps a better move would be for Apple to open up HomeKit so that more devices start to support it. When looking for HomeKit plugs, for example, I can always find about 18 million Alexa/Google ones and 2 for HomeKit. I want to see fantastic developers like Aaron Pearce let loose on HomeKit to build us whole home automation apps that can run on either Apple or third-party HomeKit hardware.
- SwiftUI! No question, SwiftUI is the best software release Apple has made since I started developing for their platforms. It is SwiftUI’s second birthday next week and I want to see it really living up to its potential. Let’s have an end to the annoying bugs and let’s get something that handles the basics of iOS apps superbly and simply. Sort out the issues with navigation, try not to introduce too many new Property Wrappers, and build on that with new controls that enable swift prototyping and development like only SwiftUI can. And integration with SwiftData would be amazing obvs. To clarify: I 100% love SwiftUI – thank you to everyone that has worked on it and made it what it is.
I am excited for the upcoming WWDC and have already registered for a couple of events over the next week or so. And maybe this year my post-WWDC buzz will last long enough to power me through to releasing my app – we can but dream!