Jonathan LaCour

Great post from Jean-Louise Gassée, former Apple and Be executive, on some of the major announcements coming out of WWDC. On a whole, I agree with him that this WWDC was, on the whole, an enormous success for Apple, and a sign that they’re pointed in the right direction. That said, I also genuinely appreciate his understanding about Apple’s tragic misstep with the $999 stand for their new display:

... good marketing deals with emotions and impressions, not mere reason. The $999 stand was widely mocked in the media, Apple was labeled as greedy and tone-deaf — the latter definitely deserved. Why mar what turned out to one of the best WWDC keynotes in memory with such a brain flatulence? Why attract so much ink to a mere display stand, to the detriment of more substantial announcements?

Great Product Marketing includes the dark art of pricing and Apple, still one of the best Product Marketers in the world, can make mistakes.

Incredibly insightful article by Craig Hockenberry of The Iconfactory on the future of Apple's platforms for app developers. Most commentary on Marzipan seems to be missing the deeper implications and possibilities of Marzipan and other rumored projects, but Craig sees the big picture, and the future that he envisions sounds revolutionary:

Your iPad would behave as it always has until you plugged in a mouse. At that point, how you interact with the device adapts:

• Controls could get smaller because of the increased pointing accuracy

• Views could gain a hover state to display additional information

• Drag & drop could change because it no longer depends on two fingers

• A mechanical wheel could replace a finger for scrolling

This kind of adaptability would work across platforms – your app would behave differently when it was running in augmented reality or on a TV screen. As a developer you wouldn’t have to worry about what kind of hardware is available, you’d have to worry about what to do when a customer used it to perform a task.

Contextually aware user experience using declarative views and interactions? Yes, please. If Apple can pull this off, they'll have cracked the very difficult problem of unifying a variety of platforms (iPad, iPhone, Mac, Watch, TV, and more) without ignoring what makes each platform unique, and enabling touch, mouse, voice, and text interactions everywhere.

Great wish list for WWDC by Steve Troughton-Smith for MacStories. The items that resonate most with me? First and foremost, a terminal environment for iOS:

Much like the file system, for a certain class of user the need for a command-line environment of some kind hasn't gone away as I'm sure Apple had hoped. Now, with Apple's own Shortcuts app, more users than ever are automating tasks on iOS – it makes perfect sense to provide something more for the power users that need it, especially if Xcode for iOS becomes a reality.

As I mentioned in my iPad Pro Impressions article a few weeks ago, I’ve been using iSH, and while its a good start, something native from Apple would be significantly better.

Also mentioned that I pine for: much-improved support for USB devices, including external storage, and a “textual” interface to Shortcuts for scripting. He also makes an argument for virtual machine support in iOS, but I think that’s pretty unlikely (though would be welcome).