Last night Tim Cook and co. announced Apple’s latest upgrades and objectives at the 2015 World Wide Developers Conference. After setting a date to watch it together on the big screen at Calvium HQ, we had lots of thoughts about what this might mean for us and other mobile developers and Apple users alike. Here’s what some of us had to say…

Kieron, Developer (@mrgurner):

“I liked the idea of the more intuitive iOS dashboard/search screen – offering contextual, one-click recommendations…like breakfast restaurants in the area, when it’s the morning; and offering relevant music / audio books at points in the day, based on previous usage. But, I’d be interested to see how it actually worked in practice, and whether it provided value and not just noise. The UI demo looked gentle enough though, not too overbearing.

I liked the split-screen stuff on OSX too – almost as good as being able to maximise a screen without going full-screen. I can see the split screen being an efficient way to manage windows and completing tasks more easily (e.g. comparing, referencing as you work, etc.)”

Charlie, Marketing (@Cinema_Charles):

“The improved search functions in El Capitan are interesting. I like being able to use your own words for search terms. For example being able to search for ‘documents I worked on last week’. Although I’m a bit sceptical as to how far ‘use your own words’ might go.

I’m forever manually resizing my screens so I can work on two windows at once, so the split screen feature looks great. I also quite like that Siri will suggest who a number might be by searching your email inbox every time you get an unknown number.”

Tom, Accounts and Products Director (@thegingertom):

“I’m excited about using Apple Pay in the UK. I can imagine it prompting a lot of people to upgrade to Apple Pay compatible phones. I feel like this is the real launch of the apple watch (or it will be when watchOS 2 is live). Until now it’s been a taster/demo or something.

I think it’s quite likely that they’ll do something interesting with the iPad hardware this autumn. It feels like a lot of the iPad changes where about making it good to do work on. So we might find a work orientated iPad shipping later. Or at least an Apple made iPad keyboard with a trackpad? There has been a rumour of a 12” ipad for years.”

Ben, Technical Director (@benclayton):

“There are various developer-level things which I thought were good. UIStackView (a FlexBox / LinearLayoutView style container for Interface Builder) will make it much easier to set up common UIs. Objective-C has support for generics (e.g. NSArray<NSString>) and nullability. UI testing is now integrated into XCode.

I thought deep linking into apps is interesting – e.g. your app can supply search results to the ‘spotlight’ search. Split-screen is also interesting. It will break every iPad app layout ever though!

I love the new iPad feature where you can use the on-screen keyboard as a trackpad by tapping with two fingers.”

Final thoughts…

It was the general consensus that Apple music was the least interesting announcement of the night. We all agreed that when iTunes was announced it was new and different and did change things, whereas we’re yet to see how Apple Music is different to what we’ve had before. So shoulder shrugs all round on that one. Essentially it’s Spotify, the only difference is that they have Taylor Swift…