What’s got our developers excited at WWDC 2023

For those who might not know‚ WWDC stands for Worldwide Developers Conference. It is an annual event organised by Apple Inc. that serves as a platform for Apple to showcase its latest software and technologies to developers and the wider Apple community.

During the conference‚ Apple announces updates to its operating systems such as iOS‚ macOS‚ watchOS‚ and tvOS. These updates often include new features‚ improvements to existing functionalities‚ and tools for developers to create innovative applications for Apple devices.

What happened at WWDC 2023

In addition to software announcements‚ Apple sometimes unveils new hardware products or initiatives at WWDC‚ although the primary focus is always on software development‚ this year a lot of the buzz following the event came after the announcement of Vision Pro.

However‚ our developers seem to have been impressed by more than just that and here’s what impressed them.

“The addition of macros to Swift has been the most exciting addition at WWDC for me. As a strongly typed language‚ Swift has missed out on the flexibility allowed by Objective C (its predecessor) at runtime. Amongst other things‚ this makes the writing of mocks for unit testing require a lot of boilerplate code.During my most recent engagement with a financial org‚ I recommended using Sourcery‚ a meta-programming tool that can perform code generation for mocks. Macros provide a first-party alternative‚ providing ways to reduce boilerplate across the language.” – Owain Brown‚ Mobile Engineering Manager

“The release of the new developer API’s and the M2 Ultra chip” – Philip Konyarov‚ iOS Developer

“SensoryFeedback” – Vlad Alexa‚ Senior iOS Developer

“Vision Pro” – Stoyan Stoyanov‚ Senior iOS Developer

“Of course‚ it has to be Vision Pro and to be precise Spatial Computing” – Rakesh Kusuma‚ Senior iOS Developer

“Animations” – Rajat Kumar‚ Senior iOS Developer

Introducing SwiftData

SwiftData is a robust framework that empowers you to model and manage data‚ elevating the capabilities of a contemporary Swift application. It emphasises solely on code – similar to SwiftUI – eliminating the need for external file formats and leverages Swift’s advanced macro system to deliver a seamless API experience. Developers have been expecting this upgrade as can be seen by our developer’s answers.

“It simplifies the usage of Core Data by offering a more user-friendly syntax‚ making it easier to define models‚ access and query data‚ and handle data insertion and deletion.” – Philip Konyarov‚ iOS Developer

“Highly anticipated product from Developers. Good to hear that they finally released it.” – Rakesh Kusuma‚ Senior iOS Developer

“Excited to finally get something that works with SwiftUI and doesn’t require a lot of code for persisting data (at least for simple use cases).” – Rajat Kumar‚ Senior iOS Developer

“Again‚ early days‚ but it appears like all the incremental improvements to Swift (property wrappers‚ macros‚ function builders) combine to create a persistence framework without the admin and overhead core data added. Ease of integration with SwiftUI is another positive.Exactly how the quirks of CoreData (automatic migrations‚ for example) translate into the new framework remains to be seen‚ considering they use the same storage architecture.” – Owain Brown‚ Mobile Engineering Manager

New Technologies for the Future

Our Mobile Engineering Manager‚ Owain Brown said‚ “VisionOS certainly presents some exciting opportunities‚ and presents a whole new dimension (pun intended) for developers working on Apple devices. Some data is hard to render in our existing interfaces‚ imagine exploring all the connections between the files in your codebase in 3d‚ with XCode on hand to help you deep dive into each file.I’m always genuinely excited to delete code‚ so macros will probably be part of my day-to-day before VisionOS.”

Furthermore‚ all the developers we asked seemed to be fond of the new modular way of downloading XCode (that iOS SDK and simulators are separate components). Also‚ about 67% of them said that they liked the new ScrollView improvements with latest APIs in SwiftUI.

Here’s some thoughts about the new macOS Sonoma and iOS 17:

“Evolutionary‚ not revolutionary! iOS 17 adds some interesting new personal-to-person sharing interactions via airdrop‚ and the interactive widgets should help widgets be more interactive. (Not really much to mention about Sonoma)” – Owain Brown‚ Mobile Engineering Manager

“The new macOS TV style realistic screen savers and new widget integration are huge for me‚ iPhone widgets on Mac was a total surprise and could be really significant.” – Vlad Alexa‚ Senior iOS Developer

“I think they’re awesome and will bring many great new features for the end users and for us as developers.” – Philip Konyarov‚ iOS Developer

Conclusion

It was another exciting event for Apple which rightfully gains buzz around it and we are looking forward to utilising all the new tools we’ve got to improve our user’s experience and journey with our products.

If you’d like to hear more from our developers‚ follow them on linkedin by clicking on their names‚ as well as the hedgehog lab official linkedin page to stay up to date with all the developer news and more.