WWDC 2015 Wishlist
2015 is upon us and like others, I’ve started thinking about what I might want from WWDC later this year. In no particular order:
Apple TV SDK
HBO is supposed to cut ties1 with cable companies this year and others (Showtime2) have been considering the same thing. Seems like the perfect time to breathe life into everyone’s favorite hobby project. Really what I want is a way to play my iOS and OS X games on my TV, but I think a more general Apple TV SDK is the way Apple would enable that. I’d also love to see an iTunes subscription service for it’s video content, but that’s not really a developer topic.
Stabilization of iOS
iOS 7 brought huge user facing changes to iOS. There were bugs, just like any other release, but people seemed ok with them because they could see just how much iOS had changed. iOS 8 brought just as big of a change, but not much was user facing. Sure users got extensions but I don’t think people realize just how much under the covers had to change to make that work. And less sexy, iOS 8 brought us a sane and concrete view controller presentation concept. Things like UIAlertView and UIActionSheet (UIView subclasses) were replaced by a UIViewController subclass. We got adaptability with UISplitViewController and an adaptable presentation model. Basically, the huge UI shift that was the iOS 6 to 7 transition is now a huge View Controller shift from iOS 7 to 8. And in some ways, this is a much bigger change. There are bound to be bugs with these kinds of changes. I’m hoping that now that we have a conceptually stable base to build on, Apple can now make it technically stable as well, so that everyone can keep building on top of it.
Music Framework
With iOS 8 we got iCloud Photo Library and with it, the Photos Framework. This is an async API for accessing photos stored in the cloud. Assuming Apple is going to do something with Beats Music, I’d love a similar API for dealing with music in the cloud. It would even be useful with just iTunes Match. I would also LOVE to see this on OS X. As far as I know, there is no API on OS X for accessing the users iTunes library.3 At least on iOS we have the Media Player framework.