So, the dust has settled and I finally have a moment to put fingers to keyboard and jot down some thoughts from this year’s WWDC announcements. I’ve been quite lacking in keeping up with any news so was blind going into the Keynote, and they crammed quite a lot in without there being anything too major.

But a few things did catch my eye, so here we go:

• Firstly, a quick shout out for Craig being a racing driver. The opening video was funny enough for a bit (love Tim being exasperated on the ‘pit wall’) but I like that it continued through the presentation with parking tickets and all sorts.
• The biggest headline for me was the Journal app coming to the Mac and iPad. I love that app, it’s very easy to use (now) and the way it links in with your other Apple stuff like photos and workouts makes it very handy. But for actual typing, the phone is not the one. Now there should be much more possibility for longer entries and more thought going into them. I’m still not convinced it will replace my go to for ‘here’s what I did today so in the future I can look up when this happened’ journal app, but I feel like I will get a lot more use out of it with an actual keyboard involved.
• I’ve seen the beta of the Liquid Glass concept and I’m not sure it works in every scenario, but it certainly does look pleasing in some areas. Small things like music artwork reaching the full width of the screen is also a step forward, although there’s probably quite a lot of backwards compatibility catching up to be done.
• The on-the-fly language translation on calls, messages and even in Lyrics looks amazing. I don’t know how useful that will be for me in reality but as a concept it’s outstanding and if it works as well as the demonstration suggested, I can see people getting a lot of use out of that in future.
• The Games app is a bit of an odd one. It’s really just a couple of the tabs that were in the App Store but now in their own app. I guess it makes sense given how everything else has its own specific app - Books, TV, Music, etc. I couldn’t quite fathom how Challenges was different to the Game Centre stuff that already exists either, but hopefully that will become clear further down the line.
• The best bit of the whole thing was that the AI capabilities were in context in each bit of the keynote, rather than stuffed together at the start. It was what I wanted last time so I was glad that was the approach taken.

And just like last time, I’ll end on the good stuff coming up on Apple TV soon. Morning Show! Slow Horses! Loot! Platonic! Something with Denzel! Jason Momoa doing the same thing he did in See but not in See! Very exciting times.