WWDC
WWDC 2019 happened at the beginning of the month. I watched the keynote from home over a few days because it was over two hours long and packed with stuff. They started by announcing a few things with Watch OS and tvOS. On the watch there will be noise detection which will alert you that you might need ear protection if you are in a loud environment. There will also be a way for females to track menstrual cycles on the watch and on the iPhone if they don’t own a watch. Apps will be native to the watch meaning they won’t be dependent on having an iPhone and there will even be an App Store on the watch. On Apple TV there will be support for Xbox and Playstation game controllers, new screensavers, and support for multiple user logins.
iPadOS has now been separated from iOS so iOS now reflects the iPhone. This is mainly for marketing purposes, but it also means that the iPad can grow and get features separate from the iPhone which it already has been doing. So on iPad there are improvements in Slide Over where you can change between multiple apps in Slide Over. There are pinch gestures for copy, cut, and paste which may take some time getting used to.
Marzipan, the project I referred to in my last post on WWDC, has gotten an official name, Catalyst. Catalyst lets third party developers bring their iPad apps to the Mac with a click of the button and some tweaking. One of the most amazing demos on stage was an accessibility feature which lets someone with no control over their hands control every aspect of the computer solely by using their voice. The implementation of this was pretty genius.
This is just a small sampling of what was announced on stage at WWDC. I can’’t wait until September so that I can download the final releases of all of these OSes. I don’t have any extra gear to install betas on and I wouldn’t trust it until the final release. It will be exciting though.