The announcements came quickly on Monday. I’ve already reviewed the Keynote itself and found that it had lots of fun announcements, but I didn’t feel like there were any big Earth-shattering announcements made. Regardless, there were many things to be excited about. Here are my 5 favorite announcements from WWDC 2019 so far.

Health Trends

Kicking off this list, the reveal of Health Trends in the activity app really interested me. To recap, Health Trends look at all your activity data and analyze the last 90 days versus the last year to see how you’re keeping up.

I’ve long wondered what we were going to do with all this activity data once we started collecting it. I felt like it would be great to make a personal trainer app or something that would motivate you. This is getting us to that next step. You can see how your activity tracks over time. Not only activity but things like pace, flights of stairs climbed, and VO2 intake.

This will empower those training to know exactly how it’s going. I can’t wait for the next stage where we use this data to improve our activity even more.

Bluetooth Splitter

My God, I can’t believe this is actually happening. This is something that I’ve been asking for this for a long time.

This feature allows you to share your audio stream with someone else who is using AirPods. You simply bring the AirPods or device connected to the AirPods close and you will be able to share the audio. I believe each user will be able to control their individual volume as well.

My wife and I love to travel. On airplanes, I would download some shows and we would use a cable splitter to share the audio to our wired headphones. We have since moved on to AirPods, but have kept the wired headphones around for just this purpose. As Apple has continued to kill the headphone jack, we’ve had to add more cables to our setup.

Now, we can share the stream with our AirPods. I know AirPods aren’t great on planes compared to something like the Bose QC35s but they still work.

I would like to see this come to more Bluetooth devices, or at least get confirmation that this works with other devices as well. The new Power Beats work with it since they have all the same internals. edited June 8, 2019: we did get confirmation that the Power Beats Pro will work)

Sign In With Apple

Apple has finally launched a system for apps and website that will let you create accounts and login into those accounts like you see today with Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Apple’s take is very much user-focused as those other login systems allow you to do all this for your data. Apple doesn’t want your data. The actually want to protect you.

Apple will be using it’s FaceID and TouchID to help with this, and if you choose to share your e-mail with whatever service you are signing up for, Apple will actually create and submit a dummy e-mail to log you in, and forward all the e-mails to your main e-mail. Total privacy.

The bad part is, most companies aren’t going to want this system. They don’t get the data from the user like they would from the other services. To fix that, Apple is requiring all apps in the app store that offer login with Facebook or Google to also require the Log In With Apple system.

iPadOS

Another mind exploding announcement here. I love my iPad since I got the original. I’ve continually tried to push the device as far as it can go. My current iPad Pro is my favorite device, and I take it everywhere with me.

But everything I’ve done has been held back by the software.

Well, Apple has blown the lid off the iPad going forward. By splitting the iPad off on its own trajectory I feel like advancements will flow faster now. By creating this Operating System on top of iOS it frees up a team at Apple to work solely on the iPad, instead of having to split a group off from iOS development to work on iPad features (if that’s even how it works at Apple). The iPad will still get all the updates that the iPhone gets, but it will also get its own updates for the larger screens.

New iPad Features

With this first edition of iPadOS they seemed to have hit many of the things many have been asking for (myself included). It wasn’t a major overhaul, but allowing the widgets to be on the Home Screen might actually make me use them. Right now, I usually only use the battery widget. If they are on the Home Screen, living with the apps, I might glance at it, or use it as an app launcher.

They have found a way to securely handle plugging in a USB drive now, and files, in general, got updated to be more like the Finder on the Mac. So Files is more powerful now.

Multi-window support for apps, so you can have the same app in split view now, should be amazing.

The Slide-over window got heavily updated as well. This was something that I’ve been wanting recently since I use Slide Over pretty frequently on my iPad. I’ve hated having to change the app every time I need to change it, or when I bring the slide over window out and realize that I’ve changed it and forgot. Now, you can swipe through all your slide over windows! It’s like having an iPhone on the side of your screen, and I love it. I can’t wait to see if I actually use it.

And finally, Safari on the iPad is getting a huge upgrade. They claim that you’ll be able to actually use web apps like Google Drive and WordPress in this new version of Safari and that it will default to the desktop view. So many great updates!

I think all of these things will make the iPad a much more capable device and I can’t wait.

Project Catalyst

I’ve been saying it many times here in the last few months, but I think that Project Catalyst (previously rumored as Marzipan) will be huge if done right. Not much was shown on stage as far as Catalyst apps yet, but they have said that they’ve worked out the kinks in the system and they should be better with this new edition.

I hate saying that the Mac is stale because it’s not. It’s a great system. It isn’t evolving at the rate that iOS is because it is a much more mature system. I think this system though can bring some much-needed spark to the platform. More apps are always good, and it allows developers to maintain one set of code that can be tweaked for each device instead of having to have a whole new set of code for each one. It should speed up development time for those developers that take part in it.

While they didn’t show much on stage in regards to apps, they did show the next step in the development software. I’m not a developer, although I have dabbled in coding a little bit, what they showed off looked like it will be a great saving to the developers.

I’m surprised that this didn’t get more stage time, but there was so much to go through it makes sense. They showed off many of the changes and how this will work to the developers during their sessions that don’t make the keynote.

This has me really excited, but I think there has to be buy-in for the developers. If the developers don’t take to this, it will be dead before it begins. Only time will tell how important this is.

Bonus: Video Editing in Photos

I wanted to keep this list to 5, and I think I picked my 5 favorites above. I felt like this small little change warranted a bonus tag though.

We will finally be able to edit Videos in the Photos App! there have been numerous times when I’ve taken a video only to find that the rotation didn’t take and I’d have to watch the video with my head tilted. Most the time, I would just jump into iMovie and rotate it, then export it, then delete the original. This will make it much better.

More than just that though, you’ll be able to adjust the filters, color, and brightness as well. All great things for videos I think

Bonus: Optimized Battery Charging

This wasn’t mentioned on stage, it was one of the eleven things that got left out, but it seems like an important one. Going forward, there will be a toggle in the battery settings of iOS to Optimize Battery Charging. If you flip this toggle, your phone will analyze when and how long you charge your phone. It will then make calculated decisions about how far to charge your battery and when to completely top it off.

This will help increase the life span and health of your battery, but you also might find that you’re phone isn’t fully charged. I think you’ll be fine most of the time, but there might be that rare time.

It’s pretty amazing tech and something I never even really thought of to help the battery life of a phone. I can’t wait to see it in action.

Wrap up

These are my favorite things announced at WWDC 2019. There are many more great features not mentioned for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS so make sure you check out my full coverage!

Let me know what your favorite announcement at the event was on Facebook!