One more day the number of sessions is overwhelming. There are so many that it’s hard to choose one. The sessions I have chosen to pay attention to on this third day of conference fall under the categories of Apple Silicon, The game developer’s toolkit, What’s new in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, Design for intelligence, App Clips, Widgets code-along or Swift Playgrounds “Swan’s Quest”.
Remember that all session videos are at https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2020/
The number of sessions in a day is overwhelming. There are so many that it’s hard to choose one. The sessions I have chosen to pay attention to on this day of conference fall under the categories of Apple Silicon, Augment Reality, App Clips, WidgetKit or Swift Playgrounds “Swan’s Quest”.
Remember that all session videos are at https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2020/
Without a doubt, the announcement for which the opening session of WWDC 2020 will be remembered is that of the transition to ARM-based processors on the Mac. This announcement echoes the one made by Steve Jobs at WWDC in 2005 when Apple’s transition to Intel processors from PowerPC processors.
With this transition, Apple will complete a journey that began in 2009 with the acquisition of the company P.A. Semi to design the processors of their devices and whose fruits began to be harvested a year later with the introduction of the Apple A4 chip that powered the iPhone 4. Along this path Apple made different steps such as the transition to 64-bits in their devices or the introduction of Metal or Mac Catalyst at WWDC 2019 that were preparing for this new transition.
Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years.
To help developers get started with this new Mac architecture, Apple is launching the Universal App Quick Start Program, which provides access to documentation, forums support, beta versions of macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12, and exclusive access to a Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac development system based on Apple’s A12Z Bionic System on a Chip (SoC) with a total cost of the program of $500.
To apply for the Universal App Quick Start Program, your Apple ID must be associated with the Account Holder of an eligible program and for full details, see the Universal App Quick Start Program terms and conditions.
As expected, Apple has shown that major software companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Unity already have versions of their applications running on ARM-based Mac prototypes. Yes, including Microsoft Office and Photoshop.
Big Sur is the name of the upcoming release of macOS which also increases its major version number to 11.0. Finally abandoning the 10.x version numbers that started with the transition to OS X Cheetah in 2001.
macOS Big Sur includes some technologies to help in the transition to Apple silicon. With Xcode 12 developers can create Universal 2 application binaries, a single application that includes binaries for both the new Apple silicon Macs and Intel-based Macs. On the other hand, Rosetta 2 will allow to run existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated, including those with plug-ins, in the new Macs with Apple silicon. For those of us who are a little old, these terms remind us of the past transition to Intel processors.
Apple also announced that virtualization technology will allow developers to run Linux on a VM using for example Parallels. I have my doubts that it will be the same for Windows VM and Apple was careful not to say anything about it.
A nice thing is that now developers can make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.
Apple introduces with iOS 14 changes to the iPhone Home Screen interface where the user can reduce the number of pages by using the new App Library. It also incorporates some improvements in the widgets and these will be able to be integrated with different sizes in the Home Screen breaking the uniformity of the classic matrix of app icons. They are not radical changes but they add some freshness and organization to the endless list of apps that our iPhones’ screens end up becoming.
Developers will have a new way to make their applications known by using App Clips, small parts of a complete application, that will not exceed 10MB, and that allowing to complete a specific task can be easily discoverable by scanning a new Apple-designed App Clip code, through NFC tag or shared in Messages.
I also liked the improvements announced in the Maps app with new cycling directions, electric vehicle routing and congestion/green zones.
On the other hand, I’m sure the new Translate app will be very usefull for many.
Additionally, I think the addition of Spacial Audio to the AirPods Pro and the Automatic switching to any AirPods is great.
I think what I liked most about the iPadOS 14 announcements was Scribble and the Apple Pencil usage improvements on the iPad. It’s great to be able write by hand in any text field or paste handwriting as text.
ARKit 4 introduces new ways to capture information about the real world using a new Depth API that is designed to work with the LiDAR sensor in iPad Pro, enabling entirely new types of apps, such as on-site architecture, design, landscaping, and manufacturing.
PencilKit now features Scribble, which makes it easy to create apps with text entry fields that users can write in with Apple Pencil. Developers will also have access to stroke data using PencilKit, all while seamlessly handling both Apple Pencil input and system touch gestures.
TestFlight now supports up to 100 team members for fast build distribution.
AirPods Motion API gives developers access to movement data in real time.
Developers can now enable users to upgrade existing third-party app accounts to Sign in with Apple accounts.
If you’re interested, you can watch the keynote at https://www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2020/ and the Platforms State of the Union video at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/102/
You can watch a Monday’s Recap short video at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10691/
To follow the WWDC 2020, navigate to https://developer.apple.com/wwdc20/
It’s been quite a while since I jailbroke my first iPhone, an iPhone 3GS, back in 2010.
Fortunately, from that iOS 4 to the current iOS 13, the iPhone Operating System has incorporated many improvements and features that were previously only possible through applications or tweaks on a jailbroken iPhone. These continuous changes made me abandon the need to jailbreak my personal iPhone.
However, Apple continues to excessively block access to our iPhones and one change that particularly annoyed me was when Apple removed in September 2017, with the launch of iTunes 12.7 and iOS 11, the management of Apps within iTunes that allowed us to back up our Apps, as well as installing them on our iPhone from our Mac using iTunes.
This change prevents us from downloading the applications that we have acquired for our iPhone from our Mac using iTunes so we can save locally in our computer the IPA of the applications so that, if necessary, we can re-install them in our iPhone Apps previously acquired without having to download them again from the App Store.
Saving the IPA of the Apps we’ve purchased is especially useful if the developer or Apple itself decides to remove it from the App Store at some point. Isn’t that right, TomTom? Isn’t that right?
As it turns out, I purchased the TomTom GPS navigation application for Europe. When I bought it, TomTom promised that the map updates would be free for life. But some time ago TomTom announced that it was no longer updating the application and maps. But not only that, they removed it completely from the App Store. So, despite having paid for it, I can’t install it on any of my devices because it has disappeared from the App Store and Apple removed the possibility of backing it up with iTunes time ago.
So I find myself in a situation where neither Apple nor TomTom provide me with any way to install an application that I paid for. My only alternative is to jailbreak an iPhone 6 where I still have the App installed to access the whole file system so I can extract it and manually “build” the IPA to install it on another device. Thank you, Apple. Thank you, TomTom.
This iPhone 6 has iOS 12.4.3 installed, so I dived into finding current options to allow jailbreak on this combination of device and iOS version.
After installing OpenWrt on your router, you will be able to access it via SSH without having to configure anything else because it is enabled by default on port 22 for the root user + password.