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Looking back at WWDC 2021
Today was the last day of WWDC 2021. While the main event has concluded, WWDC Community Week continues throughout the weekend! The last few days of labs, sessions, meetups, and code have been exhilarating. There are still numerous ideas to explore, so I will keep releasing new tutorials and apps, and you can keep following along with me.
This year I attended 15 Labs with Apple engineers, which were all incredible experiences to ask questions about the new frameworks and resolve bugs I'm running into in code. Today alone I attended 6 Labs, and here are the highlights!
I attended all three RealityKit Labs this week, and each time I gained fresh insights about the latest updates. From custom meshes to dynamic particle systems to transparent textures to the subtleties of shaders, I used what I learned in the labs to create educational posts and lead meetups where I introduced other developers to RealityKit.
With Object Capture and my new companion app, you can create realistic 3D models just by uploading photos taken on your iPhone. At this lab I inquired about scanning entire rooms with Object Capture and received tips on how to create the highest quality scans.
Tumblr doesn't yet have any AR features, but the combination of Object Capture and RealityKit 2 makes it a perfect time to start creating the future of immersive blogging.
ARKit is the magic behind the scenes that powers RealityKit apps. I worked with engineers to try out my imaginative use cases for the LiDAR and the 3D scan of the real world new LiDAR devices can create.
I've been working with machine learning (ML) models on-device ever since I transformed a ride-on toy Mini Cooper into a self driving car. Instead of running on expensive GPUs in the cloud that require an internet connection and uploading sensitive data, on-device ML works extremely quickly without ever leaving the device.
Apple introduced ML Compute last year that supports training ML models on-device in addition to inference. At this lab, the ML team helped me fill in the missing pieces of an example app from Apple's presentation at the NeurIPS 2020 conference.
SharePlay (Group Activities) ๐๐โโ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ
SharePlay is a new technology that enables live collaborative experiences through FaceTime. I became interested in pushing the limits of this framework and see how far it can go. The Group Activities team did a great job in their sessions this year, and I'm excited to get started with it next week.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I believe that SharePlay is the most exciting feature for Tumblr to implement this year to help bring communities together.
I discovered PHASE by chance while scrolling through the list of labs, and I am so glad that I made an appointment. PHASE is a completely custom toolkit for creating immersive 3D sound experiences. I chatted with several members of the PHASE team about its capabilities, and I gathered from our conversation that this year is just the beginning of a fascinating technology to keep an eye on.
Cutting-edge technology cannot change the world without great design, and it's no secret that Apple produces some of the best design work in the industry. That's what makes appointments with the design team so valuable, because they give you feedback on your own apps.
I felt honored that the designers loved my schedule app Mav App and were very interested in my design and development process. I also received feedback on my new app Object Capture UI and my augmented reality experiences.
I was wowed by the demo of a USD scene from Pixar's Toy Story 4 rendering in real time in the Preview app. Attending this lab provided me with extremely useful insight on making my USDZ workflows smarter.
The watchOS team helped me improve the performance of my Apple Watch app's syncing process using Watch Connectivity, a framework to keep iPhone and Apple Watch on the same page.
I'd love to see Tumblr on Apple Watch, especially now that developers can take advantage of the always-on display on Apple Watch Series 5 and 6. Instead of showing a generic clock view, developers can keep relevant information available at a glance while the user's wrist is resting.
The announcement of Siri support on third party devices at the Keynote piqued my interest at once. As a hardware developer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast, I imagined opening up Siri to embedded devices, similar to the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa SDKs that have existed for a few years.
Unfortunately, third party Siri devices will be initially restricted to select Apple MFI partners at launch, but I remain hopeful that Apple will open up support to more developers in the future.
Last but not least, SwiftUI received countless updates to make it even easier to build entire apps in the UI framework that is redefining iOS development.
I was lucky to receive an appointment with the engineers who work on SwiftUI Data Flow, and they helped me navigate a complex use case for communicating and syncing state between SwiftUI and UIKit code.
After a very busy week, I'm looking forward to taking some time to rest and then continuing to explore the new technologies announced at WWDC. Thank you for following along with me, and it's never too early to count down to WWDC 2022! โฐ
Feel free to check out my work and reach out at any time.
