What Went Down at WWDC 2019 | Hacker News Reader

What Went Down at WWDC 2019

heartbeat.fritz.ai

77 pointsvardhanagwal93 comments

> No More iTunes

For those of you excited by this, don’t be. All they did was split one app into four. It still works the same way.

Yes you can see your device in the finder. But you can’t do anything with it other than upgrade the OS and back it up.

Want to put a movie on your iPhone? You’d think you could just drag it from finder. But no, you have to load the AppleTV app, which is just the movies and tv part of iTunes, import it, and then go back to finder to hit sync.

Honestly, the experience was better with iTunes, which was awful.

Who still uses the stock iOS app to watch videos? There are a thousand other ways to put video files on your iPhone or iPad and tons of great apps like VLC for iOS, Infuse, etc. that offer many ways of adding video files. I don't fault Apple for not adding new features to the legacy iTunes-iOS media sync system.

I do. It’s the best way to let my kids watch videos on planes and car trips while honoring parental controls and guided access.

Pretty much all of my non-technical family members, who are (rightfully) scared to download shady apps that promise free services with no downside.

I think a better question would have been "who uses a computer to sync iTunes videos to an iOS device?", but even that falls down when you start factoring in Internet caps and suchlike.

I’m not talking about iTunes videos. I’m talking about my other videos, like all the ripped kids DVDs that I use to entertain them.

I'm not talking about iTunes videos either. An app like VLC for iOS will be able to play anything you throw at it.

An app like VLC for iOs isn't appropriate for my two year old because it's too complicated and doesn't follow all the parental controls, but that's really not the point anyway. The point is that millions of people still use Apple's apps to watch video, and they made that process worse.

VLC has really offered outstanding support for transferring content onto the device.

SMB, FTP, Plex servers, all the well known cloud services, even a built in web server so you can connect any web browser to your device's IP address and drag and drop files onto the device.

VLC is great and I use it personally. But it's too complicated for my kids and doesn't integrate with the parental control system. And also, millions of people use Apple's apps to consume content and my objection was that they made that process worse.

Who still uses the stock iOS app to watch videos?

Literally everybody I know, including myself.

Why wouldn't you just use the files app on your device to connect to an SMB share and copy files onto the device that way?

Unless I missed something, the files app won’t put videos into the TV app.

If you intend to stick with the first party software, then you seem to have gotten some bad information on what synch settings can be controlled from the Finder.

You wouldn't need to open the TV app to control or trigger synch for video content.

Catalina handles both from the sidebar of the Finder.

The sync is controlled from the finder, but the available content is controlled from the TV app.

I'm not certain where you got this impression, but it is incorrect.

Here is a link to the correct information on how synch works in the Finder of Mac OS Catalina.

https://www.imore.com/how-sync-your-iphone-and-ipad-your-mac...

Did you read the link you posted? It says exactly what I said. That you can’t choose new content to sync without importing it first.

Ahhh… You are talking about adding new content to your library and not about synching content between your library and a device.

However, the requirement that you add content to your library before you can synch it to your devices is not a change from the way things worked in iTunes at all.

I know it’s not a change. That’s my complaint. I would expect to be able to drag files from my hard drive to the device. The fact that I can’t makes the experience worse than iTunes.

I dislike how much focus Apple and other companies put on Memoji's, Emoji's, Bitmoji's, Animoji's and all other shitty, cartoon representations of their users.

You might dislike it, but one has to assume these companies have data showing users love them.

I suspect you and I are not the target demographics. My daughter was extremely chuffed that she will be able to design animojis now on her old iPhone SE.

Perhaps that's the case...

PSA: for those that haven't soaked in sufficient britspeak, "chuffed" means delighted.

That makes sense, @tomglynch, but I covered it, since it was in the keynote :)

Admittedly, I use them pretty frequently myself...

Emojis are one of the few reasons why people update their OS. It is a great win for security.

I've never thought of this, but wow it seems so true. Whenever a new batch of emojis come out, my friends start sending them which entices me to go update immediately.

Perhaps they're onto something here. Clickbait in the service of security? The black hats are already using the darker side of mass Internet behavior. "Secure your computer with this one weird trick!"

Do you have an example of this in the wild?

This is the only way I'm able to convince my family to upgrade sooner rather than later. Nothing quite like square-box-triggered FOMO to force an upgrade.

Good thinking!

Excellent insight.

One wonders - how long can updated emojis continue to motivate people to upgrade? Diminishing returns will have to kick in at some point. But there is still more room for innovation in the Messages app.

Why not just auto-update the OS??????????

Non-auto-updating software is the problem

I actually use them a lot via FaceTime and it's definitely motivates me to update faster, so I'm all for it.

Just let people enjoy what they enjoy.

It makes me sad that 47 year old tech (emoticons, 1972) is the fore-running value add of a $900b company.

Thousands of year old technology (wheels) back billion dollar transportation companies.

Nobody makes "now, our vehicles come with WHEELS, the new ROUND kind!" their main selling point.

Ever bought a tire?

Apple spent like 30 seconds of the keynote on it.

> Apple doesn’t sell this stand with any mount, but for most professionals, they’ll already have a VESA mount to use with it.

No: you have to pay $200 (!) for a VESA mount adapter to use your existing VESA mount.

My understanding is they had requirements that the screen could be moved from environments and rotated while mounted, so they came up with a custom quick-release magnetic + mechanical connector.

I'd think normal VESA mount holes would have worked fine as an option, especially since there has to be suitable depth with the power socket. However, I'd assume lack of extra holes to be an apple design decision sooner than assume a money grab.

This article will give you a quick rundown of the major releases in this year’s WWDC conference, and help you get a sense of what happened — even if you didn’t have the time to watch the keynote.

Awesome article...very thoroughly covered a crammed event :)

Thanks for the article. I really like how it was categorized and had a ToC so that I could read only the sections I am interested in (iPadOS and MacOS in my case).

That means a lot :)

WWDC in bullet points: https://github.com/Blackjacx/WWDC

Nicely done!

Multi-mic capture via beamforming is awesome, I wonder if we'll see tighter integration into conferencing systems as a result.

Thanks a lot :-)

> The Apple Watch has become a staple for many, allowing them to be more active throughout the day, and saving many from life-threatening situations throughout the years of its existence

Is this a PR piece?

Nope, it's not.

I will try to do some additional walking if my watch tells me I’m close to meeting my goal. I should still exercise more but a small improvement is good as long as I have a sedentary desk job.

How is that "allowing them to be more active throughout the day" ? You were already in a position to be more active if you wanted to. It's not like the watch increased your productivity 10 fold and suddenly freed up an additional 3 hours of your day to go exercise. The wording is questionable.

Do you have an Apple Watch? It’s remarkably effective in getting people to exercise who were otherwise not likely to do so.

I believe the issue is with the word "allowing" which is less correct than "motivating" in this context.

The watches have suggested people go to hospital due to arrhythmia, with life-saving results more than once. The new Apple heart beat sensor supposedly allows this (so you won't find the same functionality on Fitbit etc.).

Pity you require an iPhone to even turn them on.

Nitpick: you can “turn them on” without an iPhone.

Feel free to explain how, because all the research I've done suggests that an Apple Watch is completely unusable without an iPhone to set it up.

You can turn it on, but it’s unusable (hence this being a nitpick).

The word "years" suggests they aren't just talking about the new arrhythmia feature.

Yeah, Apple aren't known for being entirely honest about the scope of their innovations. Suffice the say, that's Apple parlance for "a handful of times the past year."

It's likely they saved lives with previous models too. I work at Fitbit (don't speak for Fitbit) and we often see stories of people who say their Fitbit saved their life because it helped them notice some heart condition or other.

There are various anecdotes around about Apple Watches exposing undiagnosed heart conditions, though I don't know of any available statistics on the subject.

> though I don't know of any available statistics on the subject

Here is a good place to start: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/03/apple-heart-s...

No, but it restates a lot of the marketing that Apple uses. Note that Apple Watch has saved lives through its detection of heart conditions and Emergency SOS.

I recently got an apple watch, it has absolutely become an essential part of my life. I didn't expect it to. The activity thing rings absolutely true. I actually went to the gym this morning for the first time in years, and the watch is actually a major part of that.

It's actually a fact if you talk to people who use the watch.

I recently gave my two year old, series 2 Apple Watch to an Apple-Skeptical friend that begrudgingly owned an iPhone, though still exclusively uses Google services over built-in apps. After just a week, she raved about how she loved the watch and that it motivated her to exercise with greater regularity. She abandoned her Garmin watch. For some people, it apparently scratches an itch.

Platforms State of the Union 2019 had more technical stuff. Here's a good summary of the event/video: https://blog.solomonvictorino.com/wwdc19-platforms-state-of-...

Thanks for sharing that resource!

I missed 'Sidecar' - the thing that'll let you use an ipad as a second screen for a mac.

But I don't understand if it's true second screen, i.e. a native replacement for what the Duet app does, or more like a second screen 'portal' for specific apps that implement that functionality.

How does it work? Wireless with airplay (is slow when streaming to apple tv) or by cable?

The ipad shows up just like another monitor to the Mac. You can move your mouse into it and drag windows to and from it. The ipad seems to just be a dumb display (and touch input) when connected. I believe it requires a USB-C connection.

Ah, that's great! I use Duet (paid app) for this at the moment but it's disappointingly flaky - it seems to only work sometimes and when it does, you'd better not touch anything unless it resets and stops working again. Worth the setup effort for longer sessions but hardly practical for shorter ones on the go (which let's face it, is the main usecase). Having this native so it 'just works' out the box would be amazing.

So many things missing from this (multi-user support in tvOS, Apple Arcade, new text editing features and mouse support in iPadOS , etc.) and what’s there reads like a PR piece.

Also new, updating Apple TV and HomePod to support multiple users.

I was kind of expecting to see multiuser support be made available for home iPad users in addition to the existing support for schools, but that still hasn't happened.

Another nice accessibility feature was support for a new vocal user interface on iOS and Mac.

When I read the phrase "no pun intended" in an online article, I always wonder why, if they don't intend the pun, they don't just rephrase it?

I’ve never understood why people ever feel the need to point out whether a pun is intended or not. I never see (rhyme intended) for example, so why puns? To me it tends to disrupt the flow of the prose

It really means, "I didn't originally intend the pun, but now I'm running with it and proudly announcing it to the world." That phrase would be even more disruptive.

It's joke explaining to a broader audience. Tell a joke that's too subtle, only a few find it funny. Call attention to it and more will understand, but those who found it funny as subtle, no longer will.

I think it's bad style. You don't lose anything by people missing your joke. But you risk being viewed as vain and unfunny by cueing people to laugh whenever you think you're clever.

> However, this release did not cover the iPad, and is only available for iPhone—more on that later.

Note that iPod Touch exists.

Shoutout to Heartbeat for featuring this post.

Really dislike the hate on Nvidia and the half-truth marketing speak about the “$40,000 display”

Are there any good articles on the full truth about the display?

We really don't know much about the display; we just go off of what Apple tells us until it's actually out.

Appreciate the feedback.

I actually had to read it twice to get the meaning. I read "use the best GPU on the planet (not by Nvidia)" first as "well we couldn't get Nvidia so we used the next best thing we could find that wasn't"