developers

You may have finally escaped your Flappy Bird addiction from when it was dominating your smartphone screen, but image playing it in a new, simpler way, never thought possible. You could tap that bird and fail to clear those pipes, all from your wrist. It can all be made possible with the Apple Watch. Don't worry though, it won't be happening anytime soon, as the infamous game's appearance on the wearable is thanks to developer hacking the new watchOS 2, which makes this story funny, rather than incredibly sad.

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Apple’s WWDC is over for another year, and as the dust settles on the iOS 9, Apple Music, and OS X El Capitan launch, it’s a chance to reflect on five days of sessions. It’s hard to gauge the tone of a week-long developer event from a fast-paced keynote - even with an Apple Music section which went on too long, and which several developers I spoke to suspected was padded to fill up space originally intended for an Apple TV SDK announcement. If there can be such a thing as an overarching theme, though, it felt like it might be harmonious co-existence.

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Developers hack the Apple Watch to allow apps to run on UIKit, the software bones of the smart wearable device. While Apple has provided the developer world with a software kit called "WatchKit", WatchKit itself remote-drives another bit of software called PepperUICore which lives on top of UIKit. Apple's own apps on the Watch, save the Weather app, do not use WatchKit. To show that it is possible - albeit not recommended for those hoping to get in to Apple's official app store - three developers have gotten both UIKit and SceneKit apps running on the Apple Watch.

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The Unity game engine is the force behind hit games like Temple Run and Hearthstone, among others. Unity has released a new update, Unity 5.1, to its game engine. Not only does the update add additional multiplayer networking features, but more importantly, it boasts a slew of added VR capabilities. Unity's reaffirmed focus on VR could help push game developers to make the leap towards mass designing for VR headsets such as Oculus.

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It's been revealed that with iOS 9, Apple has given developers the choice of limiting their app to run on iPhones and iPads with 64-bit CPUs. While iOS 9 itself is capable of running on a large number of Apple's older devices, developers now have the ability of specifying that previous generations of hardware cannot run their apps. The reason is not to be mean or make owners of said devices angry, but rather to ensure devices will be compatible with the app being offered, and that they don't run the software poorly.

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Apple announces that Swift of iOS will be open source from this point on. WWDC 2015 is home to this announcement, the honor of announcing goes to Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. This open source bit will be married to the release of iOS 9. This software will be released for developers in a public beta starting in July. This will be a free upgrade as all IOS upgrades are, and "all currently supported devices" will be included. Developers rejoice, change is afoot.

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Apple has introduced Multitasking on the iPad, a big change for those hoping to make the iPad a "real" mobile computer. This update starts with the keyboard, with iOS 9's QuickType. A quick 2-finger gesture allows you to turn the keyboard into a trackpad. A new shortcuts bar is here, and they've brought on new support for hardware keyboards as well. There's also a Shift key. This update also brings on "slide over," a way to pull applications in from the side of the iPad's screen.

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Search in iOS is about to go a lot deeper, as Apple's Craig Federighi spoke onstage at WWDC 2015 about how this feature would be drastically expanded. Users will be able to search email to identify who is calling. Search in iOS 9 will be able to surface app content. Search will become much, much more useful in iOS 9 - offline and online - in the near future. This search expansion will start with iOS, but will likely expand on OS X and Watch OS in the near future.

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OS X El Capitan is introduced with the iOS developer feature Metal, allowing developers to get "closer to the hardware." This software element allows developers to code in a way that brings potential speed increases and battery performance as well, "up to 40 percent battery performance," has been reported by users after re-coding apps with Metal, according to Apple's Federighi. According to Epic Games, Metal is allowing developers to destroy vehicles 70-percent faster than ever before, on a Mac - onstage at WWDC 2015.

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While past years' Apple developer conferences have had black covers over banners before the week's main event, no such covers are necessary this time around. This year isn't about secrets. It's not about big reveals. This year Apple is up front about what it's bringing to the table - assistance and support for developers. Perfectly understandable since WWDC 2015 is a developer conference - a conference which is supposed to be aimed at giving developers a leg up in the software development environment for Apple products.

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You may not have heard of it before, but AltConf is an independently run developer conference held in San Francisco during the same week as Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), and Apple has just rained on their parade, so to speak. During previous years, AltConf has live streamed Apple's WWDC keynote for its own attendees, but even though the independent event caters to OS X and iOS developers, Apple has threatened legal action if organizers try to stream again this year.

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Apple is about to deliver updates galore during WWDC 2015, their annual developer's conference. One product they won't be bringing heat to is the Apple TV. This wouldn't have been a surprise if there hadn't been such an abundance of rumors about Apple TV coming with a new wave of developer tools, a new Apple TV 2, etc., over the past several months - but there it is. Either something changed behind the scenes, or there never was a plan to bring Apple TV to the limelight at WWDC 2015 in the first place.

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