Product Design

WWDC 2024 →

A quick rundown of all my most-anticipated announcements (and unannounced tidbits) from WWDC 2024:

visionOS

  • Mac Virtual Display — Huge updates for productivity!
    • Mouse Support — This makes working with Vision apps and Mac Virtual Display way more seamless.
    • Wide and Ultra Wide Screen Options — YES. I can easily see myself downgrading from the 16-inch screen to 14-inch for my next MacBook Pro.
  • New Gesture — Way easier and efficient to invoke Home View and Control Center! Also alleviates my annoyance with how inefficient it was to see the time.
  • Create Spatial Photos — Fucking. Awesome. All of my food photos can be transformed with AI into Spatial Photos. I've already done a few and this is just mind-blowing. It's hard to describe, but the experience is somewhere between looking at a two-dimensional photo and actually being there in the moment.
  • Rearrangeable Home View
  • New Bora Bora Environment — Great addition! These immersive environments are going to be such delightful additions like getting new watch faces in watchOS.
  • AirPlay Receiver — Not sure exactly how I will use this but I appreciate any feature that let's me bring non-AVP things into my AVP.
  • Improved Hand Tracking — Upgraded from 30Hz to 90Hz to make my hands feel more realistic when immersed. (For context, Meta Quest is 60Hz.)
  • Improved Full Screen Videos in Safari — Huge improvement for watching videos on YouTube, Hulu, and other streaming services that can only be played on AVP via Safari. This gets the YouTube experience from completely unbearable to totally doable. Nothing will beat a native app but this is good enough to significantly increase my AVP usage.

Apps

  • New Passwords App — Goodbye, 1Password! For me, this will be a game-changer for helping me manage my parents' passwords.
  • Messages Improvements — Some of these are catch-ups but some are also enhancements to subtly keep iMessage blue bubbles positioned above SMS/RCS green bubbles.
    • Scheduled Messages — Finally. I constantly find funny links that I want to send to certain friends but know it's inappropriate to text late at night.
    • Easier Tapbacks — Love to see iMessage adopt this from Slack/Discord.
    • Text Effects — This will be fun to play around with.
    • Messaging via Satellite — Wow. Maybe I can start doing more outdoorsy, off-the-grid type things when I travel?? Very curious to see how this evolves.
  • Reminders in Calendar — Goodbye, Fantastical! This alone will save me $57/year.
  • Math Notes — Goodbye, Soulver! (Assuming this works as I hope it does.)
  • Highlights in Safari — A welcomed enhancement for browsing websites. I like how Apple is using AI to enhance the web instead of trying to replace it like Open AI and Google.
  • Redesigned Photos — The navigation is controversial but customizable so we'll see how this pans out.

iOS & iPadOS

  • Home Screen and Control Center Customizations — Finally. Not sure how much I will personally use these new options but this should've been implemented years ago.
  • Customizable Lock Screen Buttons — I'm looking forward to replacing the bottom-left Flashlight button with Camera and the bottom-right Camera button with Overcast. This just makes so much sense for me when I'm taking food photos with my left hand or opening Overcast when I get in my car.
  • Lock/Hide Apps — Finally. Also, this will be awesome for parents who let their kids play with their phones.
  • Remote Screen Control during Screen Share — Huge for being our parents' tech support.
  • Vocal Shortcuts — Custom voice trigger words!
  • Custom Charging Limits — A nice little improvement for maintaining battery health.
  • T9 Dialing for iOS — A nice little quality-of-life improvement that is a welcomed copy from Android.
  • Calculator App for iPad — Holy. Shit. A basic calculator app should've been added over a decade ago but they just dropped this bomb like Taylor Swift.
  • Smart Script for iPad — As someone who has struggled with chicken-scratch handwriting all my life, this thing is absolutely mind-blowing.

AirPods

  • Head Gestures — Wow. Such a brilliant feature to answer/reject voice calls.

tvOS

  • Subtitles on Mute — A delightful enhancement for such a common use-case.
  • InSight for Apple Originals — This won't replace Callsheet for me because it won't have actor ages and heights, but this is a welcomed enhancement that I could see being added to to any video played in the TV app.

watchOS

  • Double Tap for Third-Party Apps
  • Live Activities
  • Distance and Route Maps for More Workouts
  • Vitals App
  • Custom Ringtones and Text Tones — Finally.

macOS

  • iPhone Mirroring — Wow. Apple's Continuity continues to be the gift that keeps on giving! I totally expect this to come to Apple Vision Pro but I'm also curious to see if this will eventually evolve into something like Samsung DeX.
  • iOS Notifications on Mac — Fuck yeah. Back in 2011, I wrote about how redundant push notifications will be a problem. Apple went a different route than I proposed but I'm here for it!
  • Window Snapping — Finally. Not sure if I will personally use this but this is a welcomed copy from Windows.
  • Keep Downloaded for iCloud Files — Big quality-of-life improvement for managing offline assets that are hosted on iCloud Drive.

Apple Intelligence

  • Onscreen Awareness and Personal Context — Because the system has an understanding of what you're looking at, what your tendencies are, and what actions your apps can do, Siri can take action inside and across apps. Fucking amazing and I'm dying to play around with it.
  • ChatGPT Integration — It's here! It's free! And it's private. (Love how it'll seamless upgrade to ChatGPT Pro too.)
  • Priority Notifications — Curious to see how this pans out, especially with the auto-summaries.
  • Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode
  • Clean Up in Photos — Finally we'll be able to remove people and things from our photos in the native Photos app.
  • Smarter Search in Photos — I just want to be able to say, "Siri, show me everything shot on this day."
  • "Siri, how do I…?" — Huge for my parents.
  • Genmoji — This honestly might replace GIF reactions for me in my daily interactions. Can't wait!

Overall, this would have to be one of the best WWDCs I've seen. It had an excellent variety of quality-of-life improvements, nice catch-ups from Android, meeting AI expectations, and a few mind-blowing announcements. Can't wait to get my hands on the public betas!