I finally had some time to catch up with all the WWDC news, watched the Platform State of the Union and played with iPadOS. So I wanted to take some time to wrap my head around the most important announcements. iOS It wasn’t a big year for iOS. We got more stability improvements, which are always welcome. We also got a system-wide Dark Mode. Everyone seems to lose their minds around this feature. I already use a Dark Mode in a few apps and I didn’t miss it from iOS, but it is a welcome change nonetheless. Apple again focused on Privacy. Sign In with Apple is a welcome service especially because it hides your email from the service. Password managers made it possible for me to use and manage unique accounts for all websites so I never used any of the services out there, like Google or Facebook (I mean, seriously, log in with Facebook? Who even considers this?).

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This post takes a look at ARKit Face Tracking on iPhone X, XS, XR and iPad Pro 2018. It is based on my WWDC 2019 Scholarship Submission. I am not an artist. All models I created for this post are just for illustration purposes. But I want to look into the code required to create your own Animoji. This post is divided into four steps: Basics of ARKit Face Tracking Creating a character model in Blender Getting the character into SceneKit Animating the character ARKit Face Tracking ARKit Face Tracking is easy to setup. Simply start an ARFaceTrackingConfiguration where it is supported and ARKit sets everything up for your. When a face is detected by the True Depth Camera ARKit creates an ARFaceAnchor. Then, make your ViewController confirm to ARSCNViewDelegate and implement renderer(_:didAdd:for:) where you add and load your face. func renderer(_ renderer: SCNSceneRenderer, didAdd node: SCNNode, for anchor: ARAnchor) { guard anchor is ARFaceAnchor else { return } node.addChildNode(characterNode) } To receive updated facial expressions also implement the renderer(_didUpdate:for:) method as well.

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I spent the last days building a custom theme for my blog. You can find the source on GitHub. It is based on the Hyde Theme and the modifications Manton made for micro.blog. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. What du you think? You can find some details about what I created below. Features Separate between posts and microposts I wanted to separate between long blog posts and microblog posts. While I could use micro.blog categories for that I didn’t want to remember to tag every microblog post with a special category, especially because Icro, my preferred iOS client, does not support categories at all. I created three categories, Blog, Microblog, Photo. Micro.blog can tag every photo automatically, but unfortunately you can’t set a default category. That’s why I overwrote the layouts/categories/category.html template. This checks if the current category is microblog and renders every post in a special micro-format (defined at layouts/post/micro.html). Other categories render only posts that are tagged with the category.

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This years WWDC is over and I am already back in Germany. I had an intense week with a lot of great experiences and this post is my attempt to process and recap all the great things that happened. Announcements The keynote is the most important part of WWDC. At least this was my experiences from the last years. This years keynote was – lets say underwhelming. Tim Cook set the expectations right at the start: “This WWDC is all about software.” So no new Hardware, no new MacBook Pros, no update to the iPhone SE, iPads or even AirPower. But this is a conference for developers, and they want to talk about software (although a new MacBook Pro was the one thing everyone secretly hoped for when I talked with everyone on Sunday.) iOS 12 looks exciting, with great stuff like ARKit 2 and Shortcuts. I am playing around with both APIs right now and can’t wait to see how developers will use those in September.

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WWDC 2018 starts at June 4th and is less then 2 weeks away. It is the very first (and probably only) WWDC I will attend in person (I won a scholarship) so I am pretty excited. But the rumours suggest a pretty small update, at least for iOS, so I just want to sum up my thoughts and expectations about this years conference. iOS Lets start with iOS. For years the iOS update was the highlight of the WWDC keynote. This could be different this year. Back in January it was [rumoured] that iOS 12 will focus on reliability and performance. This is a very welcome change since especially iOS 11.0 had quite a few issues for a lot of people and some highlighted features from WWDC 2016, like Messages in the Cloud, are still not available to end-users. Laying a foundation for a big update next year sounds like a very good idea. Watching the keynote for Google IO and the new features of Android P one thing that catched my eye was Googles take on digital wellbeing.

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