WWDC 2020 is now only a few hours away and here’s a list of things I’m hoping to see.
- SwiftUI 2.0! When SwiftUI was announced last year it rocked my world! Hyperbole, perhaps, but the paradigm that SwiftUI is ushering in makes iOS app development a joy for me. I’d like to see app navigation overhauled so as to make programmatic navigation easier, and some new controls such as a Collection View implemented. Round it off with a new level of polish and stability please.
- ARM! The rumours have been around for a while, but they’ve really gathered pace lately. Switching to ARM chipsets will hopefully allow Apple to make improvements to their Macs more quickly and consistently. If they announce hardware I’ll be surprised, but delighted. Big shifts like this are also exciting, because you never know what might happen!
- Xcode on iPad! I’ve been doing Swift and SwiftUI dev in Xcode on my iPad for a year using Luna Display, but I’d love a native iPad experience. No need for Interface Builder or anything like that, just the text-editing will do and I’m all set. Face it, with the move to ARM we will have Xcode running on Apple’s ARM-based hardware at some point, so why not give us a little taster now, Apple?
- SwiftData! This is something that I would really like to see. As I am a SQL-head by trade, I’d love to see something that integrated SQLite with Swift, and also hooked into SwiftUI easily. If they can make it sync to all your devices too, that would be the icing on a very tasty cake. I want SwiftData to allow me to write all my own SQL, but it should also be ORM-based for those that want a layer of abstraction on top.
This is the most excited I’ve been about a WWDC as I feel more a part of the community this year than ever before. I can’t wait to watch the keynote, watch the tech sessions, and see just how awesome SwiftUI is going to be.