The Relay FM family comes together in San Francisco to discuss the WWDC announcements, in front of a live audience.
Last night in San Francisco, we recorded a very special episode of Connected featuring multiple segments – with some fantastic co-hosts – on the announcements from WWDC and more. You can listen here.
RelayCon San Francisco wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing sponsors. Thanks to Cards Against Humanity, Textexpander, from Smile, MacMiniColo, Dash, and MacPaw.
In Apple’s updated Apple TV developer documentation for the new version of tvOS coming this Fall, one line in particular has stuck out to developers in the document about MFi Game Controllers:
When designing a tvOS game, you may require the use of an MFi game controller, but where possible you should also support the Siri Remote.
This line does need to be taken with a grain of salt since these are the preliminary release notes for the just-released beta, and therefore the rules could be changed at any time between now and the Fall. But with that said, it is striking that the line would make its way back into the documentation if it weren’t going to be there to stay. I say “back” because similar language actually existed in the initial tvOS documentation last Fall, but was changed to reflect that under no circumstances would apps be allowed in the store unless they had some sort of support for the Siri Remote rather than solely supporting MFi controllers.
Polygon covered this topic last year, and discussed that Apple may in the future decide to loosen the reigns on this policy and let some MFi controller-only apps into the store.
We’ll have to keep watching through the summer to see for the sure, but it looks like there’s a new glimmer of hope that games with more advanced controls will be able to get into the Apple TV App Store without needing to neuter their control scheme to support a Remote that is not at all optimized for playing games.
You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.
For anyone who missed the live stream, Apple has now posted the full two hour video from this morning’s WWDC keynote online.
At WWDC we made lots of major announcements. iOS 10 is our biggest release yet, with incredible features in Messages and an all-new design for Maps, Photos, and Apple Music. With macOS Sierra, Siri makes its debut on your desktop and Apple Pay comes to the web. The latest watchOS offers easier navigation and a big boost in performance. And the updated tvOS brings expanded Siri searches.
We’ll be continuing our coverage of WWDC announcements throughout the day (and the rest of the week), but if you have two hours the keynote is always worth a watch (and don’t worry, this year’s keynote is much tighter than last year’s).
You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.
I haven’t read many tvOS wish lists this year (primarily because I don’t use my Apple TV very often), but I found Joe Steel’s tvOS wish list to offer a lot of interesting ideas, such as a UI for live programming:
Apple could offer a mechanism for an installed app to register that it offers live video, and to detail what the programming for that live video is. Only the applications that are installed would be present, and their programming viewable while watching another video stream. Potentially you could even ask Siri “What’s on?” to pull up the guide. Or ask “When are the Oscars on?” and get that familiar, linear bar of what’s available.
Let’s not forget that “live TV” isn’t typically live, it’s just an linear stream of shows and ads set to play at given times. That linear stream is a useful way (but not the only way) for people to find new shows thanks to the serendipity of turning on a TV during a certain time slot. Techies might scoff at such notions, but … like it’s a thing.
His thoughts on backups, App Store, and the Remote app are also spot-on.
The mission of Canvas has always been to illuminate the parts of iOS that people think cant be done. In that spirit, this week Fraser and Federico dig into how to program on iOS.
We take a look at both traditional Integrated Development Environment tools such as Pythonista and Codea and block-based programming tools like Editorial, Workflow and Hopscotch.
Just ahead of WWDC, Fraser and I prepared a special episode of Canvas all about programming on iOS. It’ll be interesting to see how outdated this will be by next week. You can listen here.
Regy Perlera has some ideas for improving how third-party keyboards are installed on iOS and how users could switch between them. I think we’re not going to see any meaningful improvements to custom keyboards next week, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
I also realized that “improving keyboards” is something I’ve linked quite a bit on MacStories over the years.
The Iconfactory has launched BitCam, a new iPhone app inspired by old Macintosh apps. BitCam lets you take pictures and apply retro filters such as dithering. It’s fun and it makes people like Stephen Hackett happy.
Even if I can’t relate to it because I didn’t live in the Macintosh era, my favorite part of BitCam is the care The Iconfactory put into making everything feel retro and old. The icons in the app are intentionally low-res and menus don’t appear with a standard iOS animation. The app has credits that scroll and there’s throttling to simulate how old computers would react to more advanced settings, such as higher-res colors.
Even better, the entire website is styled to feel old: it’s an .html page, it has an animated “under construction” GIF, a “webmaster” email address, and multiple references to “application store” instead of App Store. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate The Iconfactory’s 20th anniversary.
Lauren Goode, writing for The Verge, on Phil Schiller’s subscription comments:
Schiller imagines scenarios where many kinds of apps that were previously single-time purchases could move to the model. Games that have an ongoing subscription-like program, ones that have a massive online playing world that require upgrades of game worlds, might make sense. He suggests many enterprise apps could move to subscription, and that professional apps that require “a lot of maintenance of new features and versions” would be a good fit.
Taking Schiller’s comment at face value, it does sound like developers of productivity apps will be able to experiment with subscriptions. “A lot of maintenance” applies to most of the apps I have on my devices, which use the classic paid-up-front model.
Also from the article, this semi-hidden note on a new subscription management UI coming to the App Store:
The App Store will also have a revamped interface to make it “even easier for users to manage subscriptions,” he adds.
I’ve been saving a “finally” for these buttons that are still around in iOS 9.
This week, our WWDC predictions take a back seat to major changes coming to the App Stores.
This week’s Connected has more thoughts on Apple’s App Store changes and subscriptions for apps. You can listen here.
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