What are you expecting from WWDC20?

Recorded March 24th 2020 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

Do you think Apple can use WWDC20 to really produce a good online conference experience?

James Thomson: I think it'll be interesting to see. I mean one of the things that's happened in the last couple of weeks is Google canceled even its online stuff. We might be at a situation where we don't get WWDC.

I mean it doesn't mean that stuff might not get released or information, because we had all this stuff in 13. Which is kind of stuff that we would have got at WWDC. Now, we might just get a gradual rollout of functionality over the year. That's one possibility. And I have no knowledge of what Apple are planning.

But even putting together a good online thing might be hard in the current situation. If everybody's working from home, you can do some stuff – I mean you can certainly do slides with voiceover. You could do that to the professional quality that Apple has done their talks before. Very nicely polished and presented.

But we might not get the slick video talks and things like that. I'm interested in seeing what they do, and what they can do. But as we're saying like with our mental state and stuff, it's going to be the same for all the people at Apple who are currently trying to put all this stuff together. And not just put together talks and virtual conferences and things, but finish off operating system features. And we were talking about it before, app review is running quite slow at the moment; about at least a week more than normal.

And under normal circumstances I'd be on Twitter grumbling and saying, "Apple terrible." Now I'm just thinking, all these app review people who are – it should be pointed out – people, are under the same kind of situations that we're in. And they might not be working well, and they've got backlogs and they're dealing with family, and they're dealing with other stuff.

I don't want to set the expectation super high for this, that this is going to be the slickest, most innovative distance learning whatever thing. Because it might not be, it might be that Apple doesn't have the cycles to do that. What I'd hope is that it at least starts them thinking about this. And maybe we don't get the full rollout of what they would like to do this year. Maybe we get it next year. I would hope that even if the world has gone back to complete normality, that this kind of stuff and making things more available to people around the world, is good for Apple. It's good for the developers.

Putting that extra effort into it would be beneficial for everyone.

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