This past week, a couple of us at Metal Toad traveled down to San Francisco for WWDC and AltConf. There were a ton of great sessions and presentations throughout the week, and we’d like to share the best of the best with you.
The videos directly from Apple are already available, the videos from AltConf aren’t yet, but we’ll post part 2 when they become available.
General Interest Talks
These talks would be interesting to anyone with even a passing interest in technology, no need to be a developer to enjoy.
The Talk Show is a weekly podcast about all things Apple. In this special live edition, host John Gruber interviews Phil Schiller (yes, that Phil Schiller) about the current state of things at Apple.
Note: This interview was held at a 21+ venue, and there’s a bit of adult language in the opening act.
This was the opening talk of the week at WWDC. Many people likely watched this live, but if you missed it, here’s the link. You’re safe to stop watching at “One more thing…”.
Swift Talks
With the rapid rate of internal development in Swift, there was no shortage of things to show.
Swift is putting a major emphasis on composition over inheritance. This talk goes into some of the new language features in support of that.
Piggybacking on the concepts discussed in the protocol-oriented programming talk discussed above, this talk discusses the concept of moving away from classes with reference types and towards structs with value types in Swift.
General iOS Development Talks
Xcode 7 made a ton of advances in testing. One of the biggest additions is UI automation testing. This is a huge step towards letting developers build comprehensive tests and ultimately more stable applications.
One More Thing…
This isn’t a talk, but we stopped by the fundraiser for App Camp For for Girls on Wednesday night. It’s one of our favorite non-profits. It started here in Portland, and they’re growing every year. Right now they’re running a crowd funding campaign to move to even more cities. We’ve donated, and so should you!