Posting from San Francisco: Today’s WWDC keynote brought with it a ton of announcements about the future of Apple’s products and services. To help sort through the barrage of information, I sought out a few developers from Seattle-based companies who were in town for the conference to get their reactions to today’s news.
Here’s what they had to say:
Dave Peck, co-founder of Cloak:
What was your favorite announcement today?
I think I was actually excited about the Mac Pro. I thought that was pretty interesting. It’s unusual for Apple to talk about things before they’re ready to go on the market, but I know that they’ve had a gap in the lineup for a couple of years, so it’s nice to finally have a sense for where they’re heading there.
What product, feature or service would you most want to see Apple announce next?
I’d love to see an entire keynote–and about half of it would be for the public and about half of it would be strictly for developers–about fixing their cloud services, which are broken in many ways. They’re confusing for users–I know iTunes Match for a lot of users is a very confusing process–and I know that from a developer’s perspective it’s very difficult to buy into some parts of the iCloud ecosystem.
Jumana Al Hashal, Mobile Develoment Manager for Zillow:
What was your favorite announcement today?
Auto-updates for apps. That’s what my favorite announcement was. It really is the hugest pain right now, trying to always code around people who have really old apps and are not updating….That means we ship a bug [fix] and it’s out there, and you’re trying to reach out to people to have them update so that [they] stop complaining, stop reaching out to customer support, stop writing bad reviews, here’s a fix for [them]. And they have to go and manually update it. It’s just really cumbersome, and Android has had that for a very long time, so it’s just about time.
What product, feature or service would you most want to see Apple announce next?
I just thought iOS 7 was going to be a bigger departure, once they introduced tags on OS X, I just thought we were going to get more and more away from a bunch of icons on a screen. The intro got my hopes up high, that it somehow is going to be more user-centric, and [focused on] the user’s day.
Just more of that personalization and individualization and less that my phone opens on a number of apps, maybe half of them I don’t use most of the time. I was looking for a new paradigm to interact with my phone even more.
Ryan Bruels, Head of iOS Development for Inkstone and Israel Pasos, Head of Product Development for Inkstone:
What was your favorite announcement today?
Bruels: The backgrounding for all apps is amazing. It’s something that’s been a limiting factor for a long time, it’s even put choke points in apps that we’ve written for our customers, or internally, it’s like, how do we accomplish what we want to without being a Voice-over-IP app, a geolocation app, all this other stuff, so that’s huge. I think a lot of the animation potential that they’re talking about, the physics engine that’s built into the UI, I can’t wait to see what that’s about and how we can leverage that.
Pasos: Push updates. I’m very excited about push updates.
What product, feature or service would you most want to see Apple announce next?
Bruels: Honestly, for me, it’s getting away from the desktop world….I think that iOS has taught us that there are better ways to do [interface design], so I was hoping for a more transformative OS X, I would love to see Apple make a huge push to what is the future of desktop computing. And I know it’s in there. I know they’re going to be the ones that are going to push it.
Previously on GeekWire: Sherlocked! Apple’s iOS 7 Photos app gives indie developer a taste of tradition
