WWDC 2021 Announced and New Developer App
Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 7 through 11, in an all-online format. Free for all developers, WWDC21 will offer unique insight into the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
We’ve made improvements to the look and feel of the Developer app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac to help you enjoy articles, videos, news and announcements, and past WWDC content. You can browse content more easily on iPad with a new sidebar (iPadOS 14 or later), enjoy fullscreen video content on larger Mac displays, and discover content to watch and read using the new Search area.
John Voorhees (also: MacRumors):
The sidebar of Developer is now easier to navigate. On the iPhone and iPad, content categories, such as Design, Frameworks, and Graphics and Games, can now be collapsed, greatly reducing the amount of vertical scrolling when browsing news and sessions. The iPhone and iPad versions of the app use a more compact, tile-based layout for the Discover tab, which allows for more items to be featured too. The design works well on the smaller screen of the iPhone, but where it really shines is on the iPad and Mac’s larger screens.
The Mac version crashes at launch on Catalina. I also tried it on Big Sur, where it’s better than before but still just a bad app. This is Apple’s example to developers of how to make a universal app using Catalyst. It’s been almost two years now since Craig Federighi said the Catalyst apps were going to get “really good.” Are any of them good now? I see Maps praised a lot, but the arrow keys don’t work properly in its sidebar, and its preferences look funny.
Previously:
Update (2021-04-16): Russell Ivanovic:
Mac development must be so damn hard. Not even Apple can get a simple view resize to work without animation glitches. Where did those black flying tiles come from, where are they going? Who knows? 🙃
Also, the sidebar doesn’t animate when you change the font size, like in regular Mac apps.
The app now works on Catalina.
Update (2021-06-18): Tom Harrington:
Apple’s Developer app has a feature called “copy code” for some videos that displays code used in the video. Despite the name, there’s not actually any way to copy the code. I don’t know why it’s called that.
You also can’t copy text from the Code tab, and other text in the app is not selectable or copyable. Additionally, there’s no way to select or download more than one video at a time.
When I open a Catalyst app for the first time, I usually find myself saying, "Oh, it's a Catalyst app" in an even more bitter tone than when I open an Electron app and say, "Oh, it's an Electron app."