WWDC Day 0, Part 2 - Platforms State of the Union

The Platforms State of the Union session was much more interesting than the keynote. Highlights applicable to what I work on:

• CloudKit - looks like Apple is setting up a JSON server for Mac and iOS apps to use as a backend. Have to have an AppleID, so I don't know how useful it really is for customers not in the Apple ecosystem, but I intend to find out.
• StackView - Finally. A useable layout manager. With several different sizes of iOS devices out there, having a much more flexible adaptive layout manager has been missing for too long. Tcl/Tk and Java AWT/Swing have had this for years; good to see something useful here.
• Storyboard linking - Hooray! Before Xcode 7, all of your storyboard UI was in one big file. This made it really hard to manage, particularly when you have multiple panels with multiple engineers working on them. Xcode's Interface Builder really likes to have a big screen, and the very large storyboard made it worse. Better zooming in IB would help, but breaking this out really needed to happen.
• Xcode now has memory checking features. Looks like a combination of static and runtime analysis. This looks as useful or more than tools like Coverity and Purify.
• There is UI testing now. This is really big. One of the big problems with both iOS and Mac OS is that there has been no way to record and test actions with UI elements. Web developers for years have had Selenium for this, and there really has been no comparable native solution for most other platforms. There are some things you have to make your app do to take advantage of this:
  
  • You have to make your app accessible.
  • You have to make your app localizable.
  • You have to make your app use the Size classes (which make the UI adaptable; see StackKit above)

You should do those things anyway.
Great session.