June 7, 2021

WWDC 2021

What a great start. The keynote itself was ok, but the overall feeling of a iterative improvements gave us fantastic features and updates. Rapid fire thoughts:

  • Shortcuts for Mac: mentally insert a yes! GIF here. Still waiting for details, but having automatization and easy scriptability across the platforms is great news.
  • Better iPadOS Multitasking: better as in button based window management — rather than hard to discover and remember gestures — is a huge improvement.
  • Safari redesign: in fairness, of course the desktop features Opera did it all first™, and the new design is a close cousin of Firefox’s 89. But the Mobile Safari UX looks sweet.
    • Extensions for iOS/iPadOS: gets a double sweet from me. Hopefully now my favorite extensions will finally come to Safari.
  • Live Text: OCR across all your images is a powerful and useful feature.
  • Universal Control: is typical Apple, a feature that has existed for years on other platforms/3rd party apps, but done in such an elegant and integrated way it sets a new high bar.
  • Focus: very simple profiles for notifications, but happy it’s available across all platforms also.
  • iCloud+: confused, all I understood is now I get a free VPN with my iCloud plan.
  • Quick Notes: already have this with Drafts on Mac, but useful on the iPad when using the Pen.
  • On Device Siri: hopefully means faster Siri for simple tasks. Not holding my breath.
  • macOS Monterey:
    • On device Dictation: without 60 timeout will be useful.
    • New Split View Options: minor but great for me, you can now swap full screen split windows or make them both go full screen without having to return to regular size first.

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Firefox Redesign Selena Deckelmann on blog.mozilla.org: We redesigned these tabs so that they floated neatly, and we added the visual indicators, like blocking
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