After Monday's inaugural lecture at the WWDC, Apple has made it clear that this year its winning bet was developers. It is the group that has seen the most news and demands fulfilled and for which the most news has been shown. He has taken out his SDK (Software Development Kit) more ambitious since the irruption of the iOS platform and the most open to third parties.
Swift
It is certainly one of the major advances of the company in years, bringing programming closer to the less expert and making it more functional. They have greatly simplified the syntax of the programming, they have even implemented some methods so that the code is autocompleted and so that we can see the results in real time while we remove or add some line of code. Now available in iBooks Store the programming guide for Swift and I'm sure that from now on we will see the number of programmers grow exponentially for iOS. This is the forum in which we will be able to experiment with those 4000 new APIs that Apple has launched for developers and that open up the company's ecosystem a bit to implement tools that until now did not exist on this platform.
APIs for third parties
It is one of the ads that caused the most surprise among the attendees, since Apple It has never been very much in favor of giving power to third-party applications, but this time it seems that they have given up. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering and the man who developed much of last Monday's conference, announced that it is the largest version of iOS since the launch of the Apple Store. With this openness they want to significantly increase communication and interaction between applications, which until now was quite rare, Healthkit is one of the examples. This app acts as a platform where other applications interact, that is, through Healthkit All third-party applications that are in charge of quantifying or monitoring your activity or your physical data can exchange that information among themselves to make a kind of "health map" and can send it to other apps, such as, for example, the Mayo Clinic that be in charge of evaluating them. The president and CEO of this clinic, John Noseworthy, has stated “We believe Apple's Healthkit will revolutionize the healthcare industry's relationship with the patient"
Another example that attracted attention during the conference was the implementation of "Widgets" in the notification center. We were able to see how from the notification center we could perform actions with the eBay app, it warned us when an item that we had in follow-up was about to be bought in case we wanted to bid, or it showed us if someone had made a bid higher than ours In order to overcome it to take the article, all this without opening the application.
The other big news was Homekit, the home automation manager. Thanks to this large number of APIs we can have our devices connected to the electronic devices in our house and manage them. Federighi said that thanks to these advances we will be able to tell Crab We go to bed and he will take care of turning off the lights, locking the doors or adjusting the thermostat. From Philips they celebrate the progress that greatly favors them and its CEO, Eric Rondolat, has stated that “We are very happy to be part of this great step towards integrated and secure home automation".
Video games on mobile platforms also seem to make a big leap in quality thanks to Metal, the new technology developed by Apple and that promises (as we could see in the presentation by the guys from Epic Games) higher image quality in video games and better performance by the chips present in the devices. Apparently it increases the communication between the hardware and the software and eliminates obstacles so that the calculation of the chip is better and faster, avoiding cuts or jumps in the image, making the transitions more fluid and allowing to reduce the consumption of the processor.
We have not done more than look at all the news that Apple presented on the opening day of the WWDC 2014. Until the final version of iOS 8In the fall, we won't be able to see all these APIs up and running on our devices, but we already have a large group of programmers working hard so that on launch day we can enjoy all these advances.