I was thrilled that GameChanger sent me to WWDC 2015 (my first!). I kept track of my favorite presentations with the WWDC app, and I’ve gotten recommendations for a bunch of other talks. My team requested a list of talks that I enjoyed, and I figured I’d share it with the world. Without further ado, here’s Ben’s List of WWDC 2015 Recs:
Talks I enjoyed at WWDC 2015
- Advanced NSOperations I didn’t know too much about
NSOperationbefore this talk. Afterward I looked over some of our code that uses AFNetworking and felt that I understood it much better - Best Practices for Progress Reporting I watched enough of this to find it well structured and informative. Would finish watching if I needed to use
NSProgressfor something - Building Better Apps with Value Types in Swift Contains some good info, but I don’t endorse the commentary on older FP languages. I also wish they’d offered better solutions for managing intermingled value and reference types (I’d rather avoid sorcery like
isUniquelyReferencedNonObjC) - Building Responsive and Efficient Apps with GCD A good technical discussion of an interesting topic. I came out of this with a better grasp of the QoS hierarchy and common GCD usage pitfalls. Can anyone tell me why GCD still has just the C API?
- Designing for Apple Watch I think I learned something just from the design of the talk itself. I also came out of it much more bullish on the potential of the watch
- Implementing UI Designs in Interface Builder This is the STACK ALL THE VIEWS!!! talk. I really want to start using stack views ASAP
- Introducing The New System Fonts Explaining the guiding principles behind Apple’s new San Francisco font. This might not be as interesting if you have a serious background in font design, but for me it was very educational
- Mysteries of Auto Layout, Part 1 Frankly I’m still mystified
- Mysteries of Auto Layout, Part 2 Less mystified now
- Optimizing Swift Performance Just throw a
finalon it - Swift and Objective-C Interoperability A lot of good info about the updates to Objective-C. Better late than never. The error handling interop is pretty darn cool
- Swift in Practice Helpful outline of the new iOS versioning options, Unicorns, and some Swift evangelism that I’m on the fence about
- UI Testing in XCode UI Recording is the XCode7 feature I’m most excited about. This talk gives a nice overview, and describes some of the less obvious aspects of the new element query DSL
- Your App and Next Generation Networks Skip to 15 min for a great discussion on the UX of using the network and reducing latency at the TCP level
Talks I plan to watch online when I get the chance
I couldn’t physically watch ALL of the talks on location, but I got some great recommendations from friends and coworkers that I intend to follow up on. Some of these also just have catchy titles :)