Well the 2012 WWDC is officially over, my body is still adjusting to time differences, so I wanted to take some time to kind of give my perspective about what we saw, and what we learned.

This year was a great example of how Apple prefers to develop technology for developers that enable them to create awesome things. Two great examples of this are the new maps APIs as well as PassKit. Apple focused less on how they wanted you to use these two things, while giving general examples, and are more willing to see where developers take this technology. 

Something that I’m very excited about in iOS6 is the realtime frame access and media synchronization in AVFoundation. While these provide the ability to add new effects to your media, it really shows that Apple is committed to making this framework a very long lasting one. The new CMClock and CMTimeBase APIs give you very powerful tools for creating compositions and controlling AV synchronization, which was more of a black box before. Another thing that slipped into this framework which I think is huge, is the ability to completely style subtitles & closed captions in video. Prior to iOS6 you were subject to using the built in styling, which may work, but is not ideal for all situation.

I will say that this year I focused less on furiously taking notes in all the sessions, and took my time and met some awesome people. I met the totally awesome Mike Ash, and a couple other developers, as well as a tech writer from Business Insider that featured a picture of us on the front of his article! It was great to talk to these people and find out what they make, and hear how they react to what you make. It’s a tremendous ego boost to hear people talk about the same hurdles of app development and how they overcame the same issues.

All in all it was another spectacular WWDC, as usual Apple’s production quality on the talks was exceptionally high. I would encourage anyone who has never been to really make the attempt to go, it’s worth meeting developers from around the world and having a great conversation over a beer. Take a look at the links below if you haven’t already to get a deeper understanding of what has changed in iOS6 (developer subscription required).

What’s new in iOS 6?

iOS 6 API Diff

Thanks, and hope to see you all next year!