Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Kicks Off June 2

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/04/03Apple-Worldwide-Developers-Conference-Kicks-Off-June-2-at-Moscone-West-in-San-Francisco.html

by czr80 • 12 years ago

70 68 12 years ago

apple.com

unfunco• 12 years ago

There is often a subtle clue in the invite images as to what might be announced.

cincinnatus2• 12 years ago

I see a bunch of Mac minis, apple TVs and airport expresses ;-)

Seeing people reading the tea leaves on this one will be entertainment for a few weeks.

cstuder2• 12 years ago

Or maybe they just like pretty graphics.

supercoder4• 12 years ago

What clues were in previous years exactly ? http://f.cl.ly/items/083S2g21292V1z403y31/image.jpg

taiki2• 12 years ago

None. It's always been the product announcements that have had the hints. WWDC usually was just colorful and playful.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4852132/history-of-apple-...

arrrg• 12 years ago

The shape of app icons has been dominating WWDC invites for a long time. They were a central design element going back to 2009 (refer to supercoder’s comment for a picture).

First they showed actual icons of apps (2009, 2010, 2011), in the last two years and this year they showed more stylised app icons (2012, 2013, 2014). The goes back to even before Forestall was fired/left. It’s always differently coloured app icons. Last year they were overlaid and angled, the year before that they were also overlaid, angled and in different sizes. This year they are only in different sizes.

All you could glean from last years invite was a slight shift in design aesthetic, but that change has already happened (and this years invite is in the same style as last years) so there is no new information in this invite.

All this tells you is that WWDC will be all about apps. As it has been for at least half a decade now. I don’t think whoever designed this even know about the new iPhone hardware.

jamesrom3• 12 years ago

Exactly, it's usually only the press invites for Apple Special Events that have a glimpse of what might be unveiled.

smickie• 12 years ago

Go on then, I'll have a go a reading too much into the artwork...

Looks like a flat version of the Apple TV intro video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFnlKtwIrFg

c1sc03• 12 years ago

Seems like this one is going to make it to the frontpage. Recap of relevant links:

Press Release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/04/03Apple-Worldwide-De...

Direct link to register page: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/tickets/

Info for company account holders: it seems like every Apple ID associated with your company account can enter the lottery separately.

c1sc03• 12 years ago

Confirmed: tickets can be transferred among team members. So if you have a company account it's time to promote everyone in your company to developer status ...

Quote from https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/more/: "Tickets may not be sold, resold, bartered, auctioned, or transferred in any way. As an exception to the foregoing, requests to transfer tickets among eligible team members may be submitted to Apple for consideration at wwdc@apple.com. Apple reserves the right to reject any transfer requests."

Osmium• 12 years ago

Not sure if it's too late for that; the notice said you needed to be a registered developer at the time of the WWDC announcement?

Incidentally (and off-topic; apologies), does anyone know if you can sign Mac apps, e.g. to distribute outside of the app store, with an iOS developer account? I'd like to sign up for one of the developer programmes and can't justify spending money on both right now. I'm not sure why Apple has two separate developer programmes anyway...

Gorbzel• 12 years ago

Regarding the lottery, I wonder if you can enter once for every developer team you're on, or just once per individual regardless of teams.

cincinnatus2• 12 years ago

And importantly the tickets are not transferable in any way.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

It seems to me the hint is in all the different sized squares. iOS is going variable screen resolution (which it already supports, only no-one really cares). Mac OS X is probably going to let you treat any display like a Retina display (this kind of capability is already everywhere, but only available in certain contexts, e.g. when mirroring to a different resolution display). Between TVs, cars, 4K, big iPhones, and so on, Apple has to bite the bullet and just support arbitrary screen sizes.

Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Apple's push towards simple geometric UI design in iOS7 has simultaneously reduced application sizes (less need for giant bitmaps), improved performance and battery life, and paved the way for more flexible screen resolutions.

This also likely means we're finally going to see the Apple TV as a games console. This similarly means that third party TV apps will probably appear (and thus we'll get CBS, Showtime, etc. on the Apple TV itself). (

Obviously Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch, but I suspect the Apple console might have quite a decent launch lineup.

mmcconnell1618• 12 years ago

What about pressure-sensitive touch? There was a patent filed recently using IR light to detect how hard someone is touching a screen:

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

amirmc• 12 years ago

If so, I predict a demo with an iPad and a Piano app (playing soft and hard notes).

jamesrom3• 12 years ago

I think you are drawing way too many conclusions from the rounded square (i.e., the app icon) motif used every year for WWDC since the iPhone.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

Of course it's more than possible that I'm jumping to wishful conclusions! But in previous years they either showed app icons, or any difference in icon size could be attributed to distance (i.e. the implication being the icons were all the same size, but different distances away).

Anyway, we'll know soon enough.

csixty4• 12 years ago

That's the fun of Apple "Kremlinology", finding meaning in the smallest, stupidest details of their invitations. It's like when my friends and I would hang out in diners and try to prove the Discordian Law of Fives by finding relationships to the number 5 in the most mundane things.

Packet of sugar? "Sugar" has 5 letters.

Coca-Cola? Their slogan is "The Pause that Refreshes". Six syllables. Six is 2*3. 2+3 is 5.

It's like, so deep, man.

equalarrow• 12 years ago

"Obviously Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch"

As for public skd, sure. But we've already been able to use AirPlay on games for a while. For years. It's obvious (for now) Apple's notion of a controller is the iOS device itself, vs. Amazon using a typical console controller.

I've been waiting for years (like a lot of people I suppose) for Apple to spring the ATV sdk on the public. Every year, every WWDC, disappointment. This year I'm not holding my breath.

simonh• 12 years ago

Apple's notion of a controller is the iOS device itself

Apple introduced standards for console style iOS game controllers last year. A handful of compliant controllers have been available for a while.

mitchty• 12 years ago

Airplay on games is total shit. The amount of time it takes for the screen to get encoded, sent to the atv, then displayed on the tv, is really unnerving.

Its like playing Counterstrike back in the 56k and >100ms ping days. Aka, not a twitch game. Might work for things like plants versus zombies or candy crush though. But things like infinity blade are not playable. I tried, and failed horribly and just ended up using the screen anyway.

Would be cool if they opened up the airplay sdk and atv as well though. I do like my appletv in general but playing games from my ipad or iphone is... at best frustrating.

gress• 12 years ago

Sony and Microsoft beat Amazon to the punch. Whatever that means.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

I remember Apple being beaten to the punch on MP3 players.

Being first sometimes just tells the other guys what doesn't work.

smackfu5• 12 years ago

This similarly means that third party TV apps will probably appear (and thus we'll get CBS, Showtime, etc. on the Apple TV itself).

On this point, it seems like we're already there. Apple seems pretty willing to let anyone with original video content have access to the Apple TV APIs and will distribute their app. Look at all the stuff they've added lately, that has pretty small audiences.

The actual main obstacle is contracts that prevent the content providers from making their content available on set-top boxes at all, because it would compete directly with their existing distribution channels (broadcast affiliates.)

gurkendoktor• 12 years ago

Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Apple's push towards simple geometric UI design in iOS7 has simultaneously reduced application sizes (less need for giant bitmaps), improved performance and battery life, and paved the way for more flexible screen resolutions.

I have never seen numbers that indicate better battery life or performance on iOS 7, in fact the opposite has been measured on the iPhone 4:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...

Plus UIKit is still monkey-patched around fixed-height UITableViews everywhere. I have increased the font size in iOS 7.1 and see truncated text all around the OS (with no tooltips to save me), probably because implementing line breaks in lists is pretty painful.

I don't really disagree, maybe Apple wants to release a larger-sized iPhone with an all-new resolution. But I don't think that iOS 7 has made resolution-independent app development any easier. (Xcode 5 has made AutoLayout a lot more bearable, though.)

cstuder2• 12 years ago

"The opportunity to buy tickets to WWDC 2014 will be offered by random selection. Register by Monday, April 7 at 10:00 a.m. PDT for your chance to attend. We will let you know your status by email on Monday, April 7 at 5:00 p.m. PDT."

(https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/tickets/)

CodeWithCoffee• 12 years ago

This is a lot better than the conference selling out in 2 minutes like last year.

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

If they're doing random selection maybe they could lower the price of the ticket a bit. Hard sell for an indie dev especially when flights are accommodation are factored in. Around £3000 total not including daily expenses (transport, food etc).

supercoder4• 12 years ago

Yeah, it's a hard justification for us aussies these days. Minimum spend ends up being about 4,000

smackfu5• 12 years ago

Honestly, a week in San Francisco with an expensive flight is going to be pricey and a hard sell even if the WWDC tickets are free.

Apple has done a pretty good job keeping the price constant since 2010 (and before that there was just an early bird discount, which they got rid of once it started selling out early.)

ary• 12 years ago

The upside is that you see far fewer people attending who aren't developers or aren't serious about Apple's platforms. Google I/O, for example, has had quality issues (with both the sessions and attendees) due to how inexpensive it was and the expectation of a giveaway to offset the price of admission.

svas2• 12 years ago

That said, Apple's "return" compensation in terms of giveaway gifts and the like is a bit... stingy. Especially given how unbelievable Apple's profits have been of late.

WWDC giveaway: A $40 jacket that says "14" on it. Google I/O giveaway: $1449 Chromebook pixel.

So much for loyalty.

supercoder4• 12 years ago

I think the value of (attending) WWDC has become far too overrated.

With all the sessions, resources, and keynotes being make available online almost immediately , while a fun week, is hard to justify from a business perspective.

jamesrom3• 12 years ago

I think you mean the value of attending WWDC is overrated.

The resources made available (for free, essentially) are underrated IMO.

supercoder4• 12 years ago

Yep sorry that's exactly what I meant. The resources are excellent and definitely appreciate the amount of effort that goes into producing it all.

atonse• 12 years ago

For me the value wasn't just the sessions, but really being immersed in this ecosystem for a few days without work distractions, and networking.

But now I can watch session videos online, and have found a lot of value in networking at local Cocoa groups instead. So in that sense, the value is diluted.

But the real gem of WWDC IMO is getting one-on-one time with Apple Engineers. If you are actually working on apps and are stuck somewhere, these can be a real boon.

eddieroger3• 12 years ago

Absolutely the Lab Time. Being able to watch a developer talk about something live is arguably the same live or later on video, but then being able to go and sit with them afterward and ask questions is invaluable. I gained more from 20 minutes with two different engineers last year than sitting through most of the sessions.

mikeho1999• 12 years ago

Absolutely.

I was building an enterprise app doing multiple simultaneous asynchronous HTTP calls, but was running into issues where certain connections would just die outright. The problem was that the dying connections seemed non-deterministic, which obviously made it very difficult to debug.

I spent most of the week before WWDC trying to debug the issue (to no avail), but since WWDC was coming up (and since I was already registered), I made sure to set aside some time to go to the Framework labs to see if I can get some help.

I went the first day it was open... and was able to talk to the Apple engineer who actually built the Foundation httpClient class. I sat down with him for about 20 min, where we actually went over my code, and he was able to explain what I was doing incorrectly.

20 minutes. And it was fixed.

I probably would've had to spend at least another week banging my head against a wall, and even then, it might not have gotten fixed correctly.

Given any reasonable hourly rate, that single one-on-one alone already paid for the entire conference.

IMO, if you're going to just hobnob and go to the keynote and sessions, then yes, your money is probably going to be better spent elsewhere, especially since all the sessions are available online, and because most of the after-parties and networking events all throughout SF/SOMA don't require you to register for WWDC.

But if you have projects you are actively working on and are encountering issues or anticipate that you will be encountering issues that will be time consuming to debug on your own, then if you spend some or most of your time in the labs, WWDC is absolutely invaluable.

smackfu5• 12 years ago

The hard part is finding time to watch the videos when you don't have a dedicated week for it.

taiki2• 12 years ago

Casey Liss predicted this last night on the live broadcast of ATP.

Now he's just going to look silly when the episode drops friday.

kyro2• 12 years ago

If they don't unveil a larger iPhone, I'm going to buy a Galaxy the second that conference is over. They've been so far behind the curve with respects to screen size -- almost every other major contender is shipping larger screens. The norm has changed.

potatolicious2• 12 years ago

Should warm up the credit card then - hardware announcements haven't been made at WWDC for a long time. All iPhone announcements are in September.

kyro2• 12 years ago

The iPhone 4 was announced at WWDC, so I'm a little hopeful.

rsfinn• 12 years ago

It's unlikely that they'll announce a new iPhone at WWDC, since (as others have pointed out) it's been years since they've done new hardware announcements (apart from the Mac Pro in 2008 and again last year.)

However, it's entirely possible that they'll announce new capabilities in iOS 8 which make it easier for developers to create apps that adjust easily to different screen sizes... in which case, speculate away. :-)

prawks• 12 years ago

Last paragraph:

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world,

Never noticed their PR lines like that. A little extreme?

simonw• 12 years ago

Looks like they've been using that line in press releases for years: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22best+personal+computers+i...

themoonbus• 12 years ago

Yes, but their PR or brand message or whatever you want to call it has always been fairly extreme. I mean, just look at their 1984 super bowl ad... or really, any ad they've put out in the last decade or so (http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/)

smackfu5• 12 years ago

Here's a good blog post on how that has changed over the years: http://www.512pixels.net/blog/2014/01/apple-boilerplate

And here's Microsoft's version:

"Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential."

No one is going to be humble in their own press releases.

rsync• 12 years ago

And so, for the third straight year, retina MBA or GTFO.

Eleutheria• 12 years ago

They cracked it.

It's about presence. The iWatch.

Enter your room, lights go on, leave, lights off. Get on your car, maps automatically on, iPhone goes hands free. Siri will be with you at all times, no need to take her out of your pocket.

But most importantly...

Payments, small purchases, worldwide. From gas stations, grocery shops, fast-food chains. One billion iWatches will be used for payments in the next five years.

Apple is betting the house on it.

How do I know it? The competition is ramping up their job listings for e-commerce specialists. Exactly where the money is, a strong competitor in the monopoly arena of credit cards.

I, for one, welcome our new payment overlords.

In my wrist.

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Kicks Off June 2

Related Stories