Linked List: June 6, 2014

Friday, 6 June 2014

The Talk Show: Live From WWDC 2014 ★

Mat Honan:

Interactive notifications will spur all sorts of new behaviors. (And yes, Android already has interactive notifications, but the ones in iOS 8 look to go beyond what KitKat can do.) Some of these will be simple, like the ability to reply to an email or text message. But they’re powerful in that you can do this without quitting whatever you’re already doing. And this interactivity is not just limited to system apps. Third-party developers can take advantage of this new capability as well, so you could comment on something on Facebook, respond to a tweet, or even check in on Foursquare. But others are going to be radical, stuff we haven’t imagined yet. Once developers begin to really harness what interactive notifications can do in iOS 8 — and they will — it’s going to cause one of the most radical changes since third-party apps. With the advent of iOS 8, notifications are the new interface frontier.

Remember document-centric computing? OpenDoc from Apple, and OLE from Microsoft? That never took hold because documents themselves have become less relevant. Notification-centric computing though, that sounds good to me. The big difference is that document-centric computing was a replacement for app-centric computing; notification-centric computing goes hand-in-hand with app-centric computing. Use the full app for big things; use the interactive notification for quick things.

Chris Lattner on Swift and Playgrounds ★

Chris Lattner:

I started work on the Swift Programming Language (wikipedia) in July of 2010. I implemented much of the basic language structure, with only a few people knowing of its existence. A few other (amazing) people started contributing in earnest late in 2011, and it became a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013.

The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.

The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor’s ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems. I hope that by making programming more approachable and fun, we’ll appeal to the next generation of programmers and to help redefine how Computer Science is taught.

Still amazed that Apple managed to keep Swift secret until its unveiling during Monday’s keynote.

Apple Lifts the WWDC NDA ★

Ole Begemann:

I am not a lawyer, but if I am reading this correctly, it means that beta version of the operating systems and SDKs are still under NDA, but Apple allows developers to discuss new APIs and features that have been introduced at WWDC in public. That should cover pretty much all the new stuff in iOS 8, Yosemite and the Developer Tools.

Apple has gotten a lot more open this week, and attendees (and my fellow members of the media) noticed and appreciated it.