WWDC 2020 Liveblogging

As posted on appdot.net:

Apparently I’m watching all of WWDC on my phone, because it’s the only current OS version device in my house, and of course a course table and video player only works with the absolute latest updates! F’shaw, like last year’s OS could handle a scrolling table?! Or video streams?!

Brings up George Floyd… but not . Some kind of fund for black developers is a good idea, but no details yet.

COVID, but nothing about the contact tracer or anything productive.

So now Craig.

“App Library” is like my page of folders auto-filled. With Apple Quality AI®, I’m sure. Probably not.

Widgets, OTOH, is a “finally!”, move usable widgets from the dashboard to pages.

PiP, great. Had that on my TV 40 years ago. Everyone except me hated me using it to channel-surf while waiting for ads to end.

Siri: 25 billion requests per month. 3B of those are me “set a timer for 3 minutes”.

Universal translator! That’s actually pretty cool. I was gonna snark, but if it’s even 75% accurate it’ll make phrasebooks obsolete.

Oh god Memoji. The hideous ingrown noses are super goddamned offensive to those of us with a real beak.

Ha ha maps and travel. As if. Just cancel this section until next year, guys. And by then, the Eugenics Wars or Terminator Uprising will have started. Won’t be no Paris to visit.

Car stuff, I don’t care. I replace a car every decade if that, I’m still using a tape adapter to play from my phone. And if I was getting a new car, I’m not a big enough asshole to get a Beemer.

OK, App Clips is like the Watch app-lets, but virally distributed by NFC or QR code. Not web tech or anything convenient.

Apple Pencil, remaking the Palm Pilot or Newton UI from the ’90s… today!

AirPods are not “magic”. They are bluetooth devices which can make me nauseous and vomit when the audio delay gets high or out of sync. I loathe this whole idea of wireless audio.

I’ve worn an Watch since launch, and it’s a great watch… All the stuff past time, calendar, timer, talking to Siri, kind of irrelevant to me.

Sleep tracking’s maybe a little judgy for me, I know I have erratic sleep and a machine’s not going to make it better.

“self-report” privacy report. So it’ll all be complete lies. You can’t trust marketing scum.

Home. Yeah, no, never letting a machine control my house. I barely trust light switches or the garage door remote.

What is this “Foundation” show? There’s a woman in it. There’s no women in Asimov’s Foundation! (OK, there’s 2 or 3 in the later books)

Why is it all dark and grim, cyan/orange tinted? It’s a book of conference room meetings.

Oh, fuck. “Entirely new design”. Big Sur? Seriously? I still think Weed was the best California name they should’ve used. Maybe Barstow if they wanted to go more Fear & Loathing.

“Buttons appear when you need them” = invisible mystery meat icons. Just what I never wanted.

They did the translucent menu bar back in Leopard? It was unusable.

And yeah, great, more shit moving into my menu bar, or a fake-Dashboard in Notifications. I liked the old Dashboard, one F-key or hot corner. 10+ years ago!

If I thought it’d be as reliable as Leopard, I’d be less wary.

Advanced new controls in Catalyst like checkboxes: Just like 2005!

Safari: Hey, the one mostly good product Apple ships. Let’s not fuck it up too much, guys! Kick Chrome for being a slow fat-ass while it’s down, that’s smart. I like that.

I just want my adblockers to block all the ads, guys. I don’t need fucking Yahoo! home page in Safari, I need the NY Times paywall to go fuck itself.

Recipe filter? What. Be serious.

Do I love tabs?
% safariCountTabs.applescript
Window #95 = 31 tabs – Window #99 = 5 tabs – Window #98 = 23 tabs – Window #97 = 26 tabs – Window #102 = 15 tabs – Window #103 = 14 tabs –

How’s your update gonna work with this madness? And I cleaned up last week! It was twice as much!

All right. The thing that matters.

“Transitioning to our own custom silicon”.

I guess “Fat Binary” is politically incorrect for fat-shaming, all-dancing, exercising Apple. So it’s “Universal Binary 2”.

And yes, of course they used the new hardware for the demos, that’s a good old Apple stunt.

Seems like it’s working full-speed. Which if it’s compiled for the device, it should be.

I’m more concerned with what happens to non-native apps? OK, “Rosetta 2”.

All right, what devices, how much, and how soon, Craigy?

Yes, yes, I played this shitty Tomb Raider reboot on the PS3. I care about code, not Lara’s pixelated ass. Nor about running iOS apps, I have a phone.

Hm. Dev kit? I’m still very negative on Swift, but maybe I’ll live (or find practical ways around that). If they’re gonna make good new hardware, and I do like many of the things in Big Sur. They just went from “no plan, last year’s tech, no future” to having a future.

Might be time to revise my plan, move my current iMac to Windows for games, use an ARM Mac for work and get back to shipping Mac/iOS stuff?