WWDC is finally here! Since I won’t manage to post daily notes this year, I thought I’d jot down the sessions I watched along with a key takeaway for each. The sessions below are listed in the order I have watched them:

• What’s New in SwiftUI: I’m really excited about the new modifiers for list, which felt a bit abandoned last year. I hope later betas introduce some APIs to read the content offset of ScrollView; I need this frequently and I am not happy with the current workarounds.

• What’s new in Foundation: The new attributed string and formatter APIs are simply brilliant. Kudos.

• Add rich graphics to your SwiftUI app: While I sort of expected the addition of Material, Canvas caught me off-guard and I am loving it. 😍

• Meet DocC Documentation in Xcode: Hands-down my favorite new surprise announcement this year. Lots of neat little details—such as autocomplete symbol links for cross-referencing—and the project is slated to go open-source later this year! 💪

• What’s new in Swift: Really loved this session, especially the shoutouts to various efforts from Swift community members.

• Meet async/await in Swift: Great starting point to get familiar with async/await and what they bring to the table.

• Meet StoreKit 2: I have no idea why I picked up this session, but I don’t regret it! Great to see async/await being already used in the SDK this prominently.

• Apple’s privacy pillars in focus: The deeper dive into how private relay works in iCloud+ was quite fascinating.

• Craft search experiences in SwiftUI: Pretty impressive how little code is needed to achieve a platform-native search experience on all Apple platforms. If this is the future of the framework, sign me up!

• Demystify SwiftUI: Really informative session about SwiftUI view identity and lifetime. It also introduces new terminology—such as “inert modifier”—that will come in handy when discussing these topics.

• Meet AsyncSequence: A short and sweet session about AsyncSequence. I was wondering how this fits with Combine, especially given the lack of updates on that front, but unfortunately this didn’t shed any light on that.

• Explore structured concurrency in Swift: This session had my favorite slide in the conference so far in terms of information density.

• Meet Xcode Cloud: Built-in continuous integration in Xcode is long overdue, and I am eager to try this out.

• Protect mutable state with Swift actors - WWDC 2021 - Videos - Apple Developer: At this point it’s probably clear that concurrency is topping my list of interests this year. This one focuses on actors, which make working with synchronized data access much easier.

• Meet Shortcuts for macOS I am really impressed but the amount of work that went into introducing Shortcuts for macOS.It even comes with a CLI for more integration flexibility.

• Host and automate your DocC Documentation I have yet to give this a try, but my first impression is that it’s more work than I expected to deploy this remotely.

• What’s new in Mac Catalyst I stopped midway because I realized most of it is not immediately useful for me.

• Swift concurrency: behind the scenes This was probably my favorite concurrency session so far. Visual timelines are decidedly the only way for me to understand how concurrency primitives work.

• Streamline your localized strings Some pretty handy new additions to various localization workflows. The translation visual editor is nifty too.

• Discover concurrency in SwiftUI Nice quality of life improvements when using published properties, but this session left me wondering how Combine and the new concurrency tools will coexist in SwiftUI, if at all.

With WWDC officially over, there is still a ton I am planning to go over in the coming weeks, including SF symbols, widgets, and watchOS additions among others.