Apple WWDC 2017 – Quick Take Day 3

I’m actually in the middle of Day 4 but didn’t get a chance to update this last night.  I’m sitting at lunch with 1,200 of my closest friends, enjoying a chipotle chicken wrap and a Coke.
Some useful information about WWDC:

1. Food is supplied.  There’s breakfast, which includes donuts, coffee, fruit juices, and fruit.  There’s coffee intermittently throughout the day.  There’s lunch that usually is a few sandwiches, chips, a cookie, and a drink.   Each night there’s an optional evening event that provides entertainment and at least finger foods.
2. San Jose at this time of year is either bright, cool, and sunny or overcast, cool, and rainy.
3. If you can’t stay in the city itself (which is very walkable), stay North of the city so that in the morning when you drive in, you’re not heading toward SFO (where all the other traffic is heading) and in the evening the exact opposite is true, which is good, too.  Also note that there’s parking right at the San Jose Convention Center, which maxes out at $20/day – but is very convenient.
4. Bring a backpack to carry your materials around.
5. Note that ALL of the sessions are available online afterward to all Apple developers.  While there’s excitement about seeing the presentations, you should pick and choose the ones that you really want to interact with.
6. The Labs (by appointment or walk-in) are the most useful as you get to discuss ideas and issues with Apple engineers.
7. You are free to go and come as you please, just wear your badge.
8. The wristband that you are required to keep on, and that apparently cannot be taken off without destroying it (I haven’t tried), gets pretty dirty after sleeping and showering with it for a few days.

There is a lot of exciting stuff coming in iOS 11, a major upgrade to the O/S.  The machine learning capabilities built into the platform is simple to leverage programmatically.  The ARKit for Augment Reality is shockingly powerful and usable across all platforms.  Some of the AR demos they did were jawdropping, and in fact, they wrote code on stage and executed it to show how easy it is to include AR support (and Machine Learning and…).  In fact, the “watch as I write the code right now” parts is the most engaging for me.

Apple is doing a nice job of laying the groundwork for future applications and making sure all of their platforms work seamlessly together.

It’s not lost on me that the major challenge of Android is the huge diversity of screen sizes and device capabilities.  It must make it difficult to write a common app for that platform.  Steve Cook reminded us that 83% of iOS users are already on the latest release of iOS.

This is a quick take, so that’s it for Day 3.  As noted, I’m in Day 4 so I’ll write that up tonight (or tomorrow morning) with overall notes about the conference.