My Favorite WWDC17 Sessions

Thanks to colleagues who – while much more worthy of the conference – were unable to attend WWDC at the last minute, I got to use their hand-me-down lottery ticket to go to my first Developers Conference in San Jose. Here are some of my favorite WWDC17 sessions:

• Introducing Drag and Drop — They go deep on this new feature in iOS11 and give an cool demo of all the multi-hand/multi-finger chording techniques

• Introducing Core ML — Apple is making machine learning something easy to incorporate into apps. So they’re not trying to reinvent the training process, but they are definitely making consumption of already-trained models as easy as drag-and-drop. This session was a good primer on how to incorporate a model in your code

• Natural Language Processing and your Apps — This session helped me walk thorough how you use NSLinguisticTagger and I got to play around with it in Swift Playgrounds down in the labs

• Designing Sound — This was a brilliant session with many familiar sounds that showed the power of sound design

• Essential Design Principles — The design team shared lots of principles, but I really enjoyed the “Design Shorts” sessions where topic after topic were presented for 10 minutes a piece. Here are some good ones:

  • 60 Second Prototyping
  • Designing Glyphs
  • Rich Notifications
  • How to Pick a Custom Font
  • What’s New in iOS: Wayfinding, Typographic Hierarchy, Contrast
  • App Icon Design
  • Communication Between Designers and Engineers
  • Love at First Launch

• Convenience for You is Independence for Me — The Quadfather spoke in-person about his experience and the importance of accessibility

There are many more video recordings from WWDC17 and previous conferences, and they’re all available in the WWDC app as well.