As with the other online events Apple has held since early 2020, today’s keynote was a fast-paced affair that covered a lot of ground including upcoming updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. If you didn’t follow the live stream or announcements as they unfolded today, you can replay it on Apple’s Events site or catch it on YouTube.
The keynote video can be streamed here and on the Apple TV using the TV app. A high-quality version will also available through Apple Podcasts as a video and audio podcast. There is an American Sign Language version of the event, too, which is available here.
Raycast is a native Mac super tool that eclipses and extends Spotlight’s functionality. With a quick keyboard shortcut, Raycast launches apps and so much more:
Search for and access your files
Use third-party apps and services like Google Workspace, GitHub, Jira, Asana, Linear, and more
Check your schedule and join Zoom meetings with a single keystroke
Raycast also supports Quicklinks that let you open files, folders, and URLs. Quicklinks even accept input, allowing you to use them to execute search queries right from Raycast.
The app has a snippets system now, too, eliminating repetitive typing. With just a few keystrokes in Raycast, you can send a canned email response, drop frequently-used code into your IDE, or grab your company’s brand colors.
Raycast is also extensible with scripts, with over 400 created by its active community of users, allowing you to control your favorite apps like Bear, CleanShot, Craft, and Things, use Apple Music and Spotify, set your Slack status, pick a color, and more.
See for yourself what you can do:
Because Raycast is native, it behaves exactly how you’d expect and is fast and responsive. The app is actively developed with new features shipping every couple of weeks, and it respects your privacy. There’s no login to use Raycast, so your data doesn’t leave your Mac, and your credentials for other services are safely stored in your Mac in Keychain.
Together, Raycast’s powerful features keep you focused on what’s most important to you. You avoid inefficient context switching and eliminate clutter, summoning what you need when you need it, so you can work smarter and more efficiently every day.
WWDC will kick off online later today, and the MacStories team has been busy preparing.
As always, our coverage will begin with Apple’s keynote presentation. On MacStories, you’ll find in-depth coverage of Apple’s announcements, overviews of OS updates and any new hardware, and roundups of everything happening throughout the week. You’ll also get the kind of details that aren’t widely reported as the team combs through session videos, product pages, social media, and other sources.
Last year’s expanded coverage on AppStories was a big hit, so we’ll be back again this year with daily episodes beginning tomorrow. Tomorrow, Federico and I will cover the keynote and State of the Union presentations, followed by episodes Wednesday through Friday that dig into each of Apple’s big announcements, session videos, and more. On Friday, we’ll also release our usual episode of MacStories Unwind where we’ll wrap up the week’s most important stories and discuss what it all means.
You can follow along with all of the MacStories, AppStories, and Unwind coverage on our WWDC 2021 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2021 RSS feed.
Finally, we’ll send a special issue of MacStories Weekly to Club MacStories members one day later than usual on Saturday, June 12th. The issue will be packed with WWDC-themed features and our thoughts on everything revealed.
If you’re not a member of Club MacStories, you can join here.
To recap, stay tuned to MacStories, our shows, and the Club for a full week of WWDC coverage:
Monday - Friday
Continuous Keynote, State of the Union, and session coverage on MacStories
Tuesday - Friday
Daily episodes of AppStories covering all of Apple’s announcements big and small
Apple has announced the winners of its annual WWDC Swift Student Challenge. This year, the group includes 350 students from 35 countries and regions.
Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing said of this year’s participants:
Every year, we are inspired by the talent and ingenuity that we see from our Swift Student Challenge applicants. This year, we are incredibly proud that more young women applied and won than ever before, and we are committed to doing everything we can to nurture this progress and reach true gender parity.
Of the many winners this year, Apple chose three sets of winners to spotlight in its press release:
Sisters Gianna and Shannon Yan, whose app Feed Fleet matches volunteers with at-risk people for free grocery during the pandemic
15-year-old Abinaya Dinesh, whose app Gastro at Home helps people with gastrointestinal disorders, access information and resources about their conditions
Damilola Awofisayo, who created TecHacks, a non-profit with the mission of “creating a supportive environment for girls everywhere to create, problem-solve, and showcase their talents alongside like-minded females to compete and work with.” Awofisayo is also working on an American Sign Language app
Apple’s WWDC Student Challenge has changed over the years, most recently focusing on the Swift programming language, but it’s been a mainstay of the conference for years now. The competition is one of my favorite parts of the conference, too, having had one of my own kids participate in it in 2013 and seeing how it inspired him to pursue a career as a developer. Since then, I’ve had the chance to meet many past winners and cover their apps on MacStories, which has made it clear to me just how big an impact the program has had in many students’ lives.
Apple has updated its developer forums in the lead-up to WWDC with several new features. Last year, the developer forums got a complete overhaul just before the annual conference, improving developers’ ability to ask questions, interact with other developers and Apple engineers, and follow topics that interest them. This year, the company is adding the ability to:
Post comments on questions or answers to provide context or ask for clarification.
Search for content across multiple tags.
Add and manage favorite tags.
Upload images to your question or answer to provide supporting visual details.
See tag descriptions when choosing tags for your question so you can quickly select the most appropriate ones.
Subscribe to RSS feeds for tags you’re interested in.
See your authored and watched content, favorite tags, and trending tags on the newly designed home page.
I expect I’ll use the new tagging tools a lot this summer as I work on my macOS review. The developer forums have always been an excellent resource but haven’t always been the easiest to navigate. Armed with a collection of tags and RSS feeds delivering updates automatically, I’ll be using the forums a lot more than I did in the past. There’s still room for improvement, though. For example, as nice as the addition of RSS feeds is, they only apply to individual tags, not search results.
Apple has announced the schedule for WWDC. As we previously reported, the developer conference will run from Monday, June 7th, 2021 through Friday, June 11th. Today, the company said the conference’s opening keynote presentation at 10:00 am Pacific time on the 7th. The Platforms State of the Union will begin at 2:00 pm Pacific the same day. Apple also announced that the Apple Design Awards will be held at 2:00 pm Pacific on June 10th.
There will be over 200 sessions available for developers to learn about Apple’s latest APIs along with one-on-one online labs covered by ‘over 1000 experts.’ Apple engineers will also be available in the Apple Developer Forums to answer questions during the conference. The company will also offer special events like coding and design challenges and guest speakers too.
New this year are Pavilions, which Apple says:
provide an easy way for developers to explore relevant sessions, labs, and special activities for a given topic. Conference attendees can customize their WWDC experience and check out content organized around specific areas like SwiftUI, Developer Tools, Accessibility & Inclusion, and more — exclusively within the Apple Developer app.
Finally, the Swift Student Challenge winners will be announced by Apple on June first, six days before WWDC begins.
Shortly after announcing WWDC will be held online again this year from June 7 - 11, Apple released a significant update to its Developer app, which serves as a hub for news and watching WWDC sessions.
The sidebar of Developer is now easier to navigate. On the iPhone and iPad, content categories, such as Design, Frameworks, and Graphics and Games, can now be collapsed, greatly reducing the amount of vertical scrolling when browsing news and sessions. The iPhone and iPad versions of the app use a more compact, tile-based layout for the Discover tab, which allows for more items to be featured too. The design works well on the smaller screen of the iPhone, but where it really shines is on the iPad and Mac’s larger screens.
The old Discover tab (left) and the updated version (right).
The iPad app’s tab bar has also been eliminated, moving what was previously there into the sidebar. Combined with the collapsible sidebar sections, the app is both easier to navigate and has more room for content on the iPad than ever before.
Search results are better organized than before.
The update also includes a dedicated Search tab. Instead of a vertical list of results in the sidebar, the results are displayed in the app’s main view organized by videos, articles, and news, showing top results with the ability to ‘See all’ if more results than can fit onscreen are available. I used Developer’s search functionality a lot last year and looking at the results pulled from last year’s WWDC, I can already tell it will be easier to find the videos I want. Also, ‘Favorites’ have been replaced by ‘Bookmarks,’ although the functionality of the two appears to be the same in my limited testing.
The Developer app has always been a useful companion app for WWDC, but with the event being remote last year and again this year, it has taken on greater importance as one of the primary ways developers access sessions and news about Apple’s frameworks. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time with the app yet, it’s clear that a lot of thought went into adapting it to fit in with Apple’s modern iPad and Mac design vision and providing a better experience when sifting through the deep catalog of videos and other content that is available to developers.
Apple has decided to make WWDC an online-only event again for 2021, which is no surprise given the on-going global pandemic. Before going online-only last year, WWDC was held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California, from 2017 - 2019. The event has been scheduled for June 7-11, 2021. Submissions for the Swift Student Challenge are open now through April 18th.
In a press release issued by the company today, Susan Prescott, Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing said:
We love bringing our developers together each year at WWDC to learn about our latest technologies and to connect them with Apple engineers. We are working to make WWDC21 our biggest and best yet, and are excited to offer Apple developers new tools to support them as they create apps that change the way we live, work, and play.
Although there are benefits to an in-person event that cannot be replicated online, last year’s WWDC was widely considered to be a success. Apple released dozens of excellent videos about its latest APIs and conducted online lab sessions for developers that received high marks from participants. Although Apple hasn’t released details about this year’s format yet, it’s a safe bet that it will be similar to 2020.
I miss in-person WWDC a lot. Last year’s online version was excellent, but it’s impossible to replace the chance to get together with friends who I often only see at WWDC and meet with the developers whose apps we write about all year long. I expect there’s a chance that even after the pandemic recedes, WWDC will remain online-only, but I sure hope not.
Of course, MacStories readers can expect the same kind of comprehensive WWDC coverage we do every year. In 2020, we tried a few new things that worked well, and we’ll continue to experiment again this year, so stay tuned.
