Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, June 4, 2018 - WWDC Highlights

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

Today, it’s all about developers, everything from Apple’s WWDC Keynote, Microsoft buys GitHub in order to court developers. Oh. And a new Facebook data brouhaha. Tweet commentary: @ericlbarnes, @HenrikJoreteg Links:Microsoft confirms it’s acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion (The Verge)Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Monday, June 4th, 2018. Today, it's all about developers. Everything from Apple's WWDC keynote.

Microsoft buys GitHub in order to court developers. Oh, and there's a new Facebook data brouhaha. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, of course, all eyes in tech today were on San Jose as Apple kicked off its worldwide developer conference. Apple likes to start off by bragging about its developer bonafides, and indeed Tim Cook kicked things off by noting that the iOS App Store turns 10 years old next month and that this week, developers will have earned $100 billion from the App Store over the course of its lifetime. But the headline, of course, was the announcement of, you

guessed it, iOS 12. iOS 12 for iPhones and iPads will support all devices capable of running iOS 11. And Apple says that apps will launch 40% faster and keyboards will appear 50% faster. Your device's CPU will be able to ramp up instantly when needed, then ramp down when not needed in order to preserve better battery life. As expected as a part of iOS 12, Apple unveiled AR kit 2 with improved face tracking,

realistic rendering, 3D object detection, persistent experiences and especially shared experiences between multiple users on multiple devices. They did a great demo of AR Kit 2 using a Lego app that I recommend looking up and viewing because it was cool how they integrated a real-world Lego set with augmented animation. Starting with iOS 12 later this year, Apple CarPlay will let you use third-party apps like Google Maps, Waze, and other navigation apps, not just. Apple Maps. As many people said on Twitter, see you later, Apple Maps. As expected, Apple unveiled distraction-reducing features including Do Not Disturb at Bedtime and features to help you manage

your time in apps, the ability to lock yourself out of apps after a given period of time, and new parental controls. Do Not Disturb can even turn itself off during a movie if it detects that you've purchased a movie ticket in your wallet app. Oh, and notifications will now be grouped by app or by category, something that Android has had for a while now, but people were super thrilled about on Twitter. Also, you will now have better triage features for your notifications.

There are new an emoji characters, a tongue detection capability, and even a bitmoji-like feature called Memoji for designing your own animoji avatars. Apple's Photos app is adding improved search that can group the best photos from an event and recognize and recommend people for easily sharing pictures with those people in them. This one's big. FaceTime got group calls. You can now FaceTime with as many as 32 people simultaneously. FaceTimes and Apple messages are getting

new sticker packs, new filters, the ability to draw shapes and other fancy new bells and whistles. Siri did not get the major new upgrade that some were hoping for, but it did get a new shortcuts for Siri ability that allows you to create new shortcuts and essentially chained commands, sort of like what if this, then that does? iOS 12 will be available for users this fall, of course, and sooner if you're a developer. WatchOS 5 was also announced with new features like

automatic workout detection, a new Waukee Talky app, which does exactly what it sounds like it does. Also, Siri shortcuts are coming to the watch face, and WebKit is getting ported to the watch in a very limited but seemingly pretty useful way. New announcements for Apple TV as well. More news and live sports channels are coming to Apple TV, and if you're a charter spectrum subscriber like I am, all of your channels are now coming to the Apple TV.

And guess what? There's no more login. at all. Apple TV will detect when you're on a charter spectrum network, and that's it. You can just start watching. Oh, and iTunes Movies, and Apple TV 4K will now offer Dolby Atmos. MacOS was not forgotten, of course. The new version of the operating system will be known as Mojave as the internet guest. Mojave has a new dark mode, new stacks for managing all those icons and files that clutter up your desktop. And there's also a new gallery mode for Finder. What else? Oh, I forgot that iBooks will now be called Apple Books. The Mac App Store is being redesigned. I'm sure I'm missing a

whole bunch of things. Apple gave a sneak peek at a multi-year project to bring UIKit to iOS apps. The Apple News app, the Stocks app, the home and voice memo apps are all coming to the Mac. But Craig Federigi specifically brought up the notion on stage of some sort of full merging of MacOS and iOS, and he was like, no way, ain't going to happen. So I think that's everything, at least everything I could cram in here and still have time to get this episode out on time. You'll notice there were zero hardware announcements. So either the iPhone event this year is going to be jam packed or else we're going to get some sort of intermediate announcements or even. an intermediate event at some point. As always, if you want to dive in and get all of the details on all of these announcements,

the best way to do that is to go to Techmeme.com and see how the editors have arranged all the headlines in a way that will allow you to jump in and out and dive deeply on the details that interest you. There was other news today, of course, if you can believe it, the most earth-shattering being the news that Microsoft announced it had reached an agreement to acquire GitHub for 7.1.7. $1.5 billion in stock. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, so this is quite the premium,

and it's Microsoft CEO Sachinadella's second biggest acquisition following the $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn just a couple years ago. Not familiar with GitHub, then you must not be a developer. Here's how the Verge describes the site for the uninitiated, quote, GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies. hosting entire projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them, end quote. What is this acquisition all about then?

Well, again, to paraphrase Steve Balmer. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. As Microsoft said in the blog post announcing the acquisition, quote, Microsoft has been a developer-focused company from the very first product we created to the platforms and tools we offer today. Building technology so that others can build technology is core to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. From the largest corporations to the smallest startups, GitHub is the destination for developers to learn, share, and work together to create software, end quote. So this is quite simply a play not only to own the largest code repository platform for software. developers worldwide, but also an attempt to win developers over to the new Microsoft of

Nadella's friendlier developer-centric vision. From GitHub's perspective, they say that the successful Microsoft purchases of the likes of Minecraft and LinkedIn show that Microsoft is serious about growing new businesses. And in their blog post announcing the acquisition, GitHub reiterated, quote, no matter your language, stack, platform, cloud, or license, GitHub will continue continue to be your home, the best place for software creation, collaboration, and discovery." But developers are quite torn about this to say the least. On Twitter, Eric L. Barnes said, I'm glad it was Microsoft that bought GitHub and not Google or Facebook.

And Henrik Joriteg said, if this were happening under Balmer, I'd be terrified. But I think this is going to turn out all right. But others were not as sanguine. The original announcement of this news on Hacker News elicited almost 1,400 comments. User Ender M.B. wrote, quote, If anything, I think this is an opportunity for Microsoft

to introduce themselves to the Ruby and Rails teams and to finally resolve the issues that stop Windows from being a first-class citizen in the Ruby world. I can't see Microsoft doing a Skype and merging GitHub into their platforms. Developers are fickle, and if Microsoft messes with GitHub, then it's not only a huge blow to the relations they've been trying to build for the past few years,

it's a guaranteed way to see developers flock to the next big service, i.e. GitLab, end quote. User SameTax wrote out a long list of Microsoft's alleged crimes against developers, especially open source developers. And user KSAC seemed to speak for a large segment of developers who harbor deep resentments toward Microsoft going back decades. quote, they can't just ask for forgiveness after all that they have done. They are obviously doing a lot of things right under Nadella, but asking many to not hate them after four years of good

and 20 to 40 years of bad maybe is a little too much to ask for. They will have to do a lot more to win us back, end quote. And lots of people keep mentioning Skype as a cautionary tale of a Microsoft acquisition that didn't turn out so well, and GitHub's erstwhile competitive GitLab was proudly boasting on Twitter overnight that they were seeing 10 times the normal

daily amount of repositories, hashtag moving to GitLab. And the New York Times was also reporting over the weekend that Facebook gave 60 plus device makers, including Apple, Amazon, Blackberry, and Samsung, deeper access to users' personal information than was previously known. Using private APIs, Facebook let device makers offer greater personalization and customization in messaging, address books, and more. The problem is the APIs also apparently allowed the device companies to access the data of users' friends without gaining the explicit consent of those friends.

The New York Times said that it found that some device makers could even retrieve personal information from users' friends who believe they had blocked any sharing. The problem is this is possibly a violation of Facebook's 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. and several of these partnerships with device makers remain in effect even to this day, even though Facebook has begun winding some of them down. The level of data sharing these private APIs made possible was described by Ashkan Sultani, a research and privacy consultant and formerly the FTC's chief technologist as, quote, it's like having door locks installed only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends

so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission. end quote. The bottom line is, right at the moment of the smartphone going mainstream, it seems that Facebook wanted to become the default and de facto platform for the mobile era, so they let virtually everyone who made a smartphone integrate Facebook features as deeply as they wanted. The phone makers got to offer phones with a super popular application that was just then going mainstream itself, thereby making smartphones attractive to users that might have been adopting the devices for the first time. and Facebook could grasp for the sort of ubiquity

that would soon make it the world's dominant social media service. But as we've learned, in those days, it might have been about getting big fast, and Facebook might not have been paying as much attention to policing the platform and ecosystem that it was building out so quickly. In a blog post responding to the Times piece, Facebook wrote,

In the early days of mobile, the demand for Facebook outpaced our ability to build versions of the product that worked on every phone or operating system. It's hard to remember now, but back then there were no app stores. So companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube had to work directly with operating system and device manufacturers to get their products into people's hands. We built a set of device integrated APIs that allowed companies to recreate Facebook-like experiences for their individual devices or operating systems.

End quote. Facebook went on to claim that it controlled its partner's use of those APIs very tightly from the get-go. The partnerships did not allow the companies to integrate Facebook features without users express permission, and quote, we are not aware of any abuse by those companies, end quote. So is this another new data scandal or simply the legacy of early Facebook partnership efforts from an era when Facebook was fast and loose in pursuit of growth? As Jim Ray said on Twitter, quote, Facebook's non-defense always seems to boil down to we were too busy racing to be the next tech monopoly, we couldn't be bothered to think through the implications of what we were doing.

And the Verges Nelai Patel said that the assumption that Facebook would become the new connective tissue of the internet led to so, so many bad decisions by everyone, end quote. Again, it's worth reiterating that Facebook announced in April that it was winding down all such partnerships and reports that 22 have already been terminated. But several people on Twitter did note, Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress recently said that Facebook had shut down all of the APIs that allowed sharing so broadly that your info could be shared by your friends without your consent. The bottom line is, however, it seems that at least when it came to device manufacturing partners, that sort of sharing was still possible. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough, at Brian MCC on Twitter.

and as ever I'm always all about Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Yes!