Not going to WWDC? Here’s what you can do next week to keep up with all the important new announcements — even if you can’t take the entire week off to watch the videos from home… ‘cuz let’s face it — we’re all too busy for that.
Most importantly, you want to pay attention to the Keynote and the Platforms State of the Union.
In the Keynote, we usually hear about the new user-facing features in the upcoming versions of iOS, OS X (macOS), watchOS, and tvOS. As a developer, you’ll learn what new features your users will have in the next version of the platform, and you’ll hear which parts you can take advantage of in your apps. If you have two hours or so, you can watch the recording here.
The Platforms State of the Union tends to be more developer-focused, and you’ll learn about frameworks and tool updates that you’ll be able to use. In the 2015 edition of this talk, we learned about Stack Views and Storyboard References in Interface Builder as well as App Thinning and a bunch of other new developer tools and features in iOS, watchOS, and OS X. In my mind, this is the most important talk for developers since the announcements are generally focused on improving developer productivity.
If you can set aside 4 hours, you can stream the recordings of both the Keynote and the Platforms State of the Union. If you’re too busy for that, you can download and watch them at up to 1.9x speed in QuickTime on your Mac (just option-click the fast-forward button a few times). Of course, that’ll still take you over 2 hours, so if you don’t have that much time, you can just find summaries of the talks to read afterwards.
Besides these talks, there are sure to be other useful, relevant ones, but just these two should give you a pretty good idea of the new features and improvements for your users and for you as a developer.
Whatever you do, schedule at least an hour during the week to learn what’s new. You’ll be glad you did, ‘cuz you’ll be a more informed, more productive developer.