Daniel Eran Dilger, writing for AppleInsider:
While still operating with full security measures in place—comically highlighted in assurances voiced by Stephen Colbert during the keynote to “triple down” on security—Apple is now working to share legitimate things for people to talk about rather than trying maintain an awkward silence between its product introductions.
The move follows a similar step by the company earlier this summer to invite roughly a dozen outside observers to experience WWDC, the company’s confab for developers that has previously been strictly limited to partners under Non-Disclosure Agreements.
Apple also opened up its WWDC session videos and actually encouraged its developers—and members of the media—to talk about the new technologies it was introducing, a marked departure from the days when even registered developers were advised not to say anything about anything, even to other developers.
The result has been nothing short of spectacular. Even people who don’t know C# from Shinola know about Swift, the new language Apple introduced at WWDC. APIs and initiatives from Metal to CarPlay and HomeKit to HealthKit are now familiar terms even to many non-technical people, despite being just a few months out of the gate.
Thoughtful read, resonates with me. The old policy caused a tremendous amount of stress for developers, hamstrung in their attempts to crowdsource solutions to bugs in beta releases of iOS and the iOS SDK, or just to figure out how to make the newest kit work properly.
On a more personal note, trying to write a book about upcoming revs of the SDK was fraught with communication roadblocks. As an example, when Jeff LaMarche and I were working on our very first iPhone development book, the first rev of the iPhone SDK had not yet been publicly released. Because everything was behind an NDA, there was lots we could not talk about, including the very important steps required to connect your code to an actual device (instead of running it in the simulator). All the details were hidden behind the official developer portal. This was terribly useful information, not particularly well documented (at least back then), and exactly the sort of thing that a how-to book should be laying out in detail. Which we were prevented from doing.
This is just one tiny example of the frustration of Apple’s rigid tight-lipped former policy. I love the new approach. One highlight for me was the incredibly humanistic way that Apple acknowledged the accidental release of information about the new iPads before Thursday’s keynote. Bringing Stephen Colbert on board as the Supreme Commander of Secrecy was genius. That move added to the brand, added to the likability of Apple as a company.