Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is one of the most anticipated events among developers and designers. This year’s keynote event was packed full of exciting new features.
Apple revealed a lot of cool new things during the event. iOS 18, visionOS 2, macOS Sequoia, and the Calculator app finally coming to iPad were among the highlights of the WWDC 2024 event.
However, we are not going to cover all those features and details in this post. Instead, we are taking a different approach to share with you the important announcements most useful to designers and creative professionals.
Apple Intelligence
The biggest announcement of the WWDC event was Apple’s own artificial intelligence (AI) system, Apple Intelligence. It’s a personal intelligence system that integrates into the Apple ecosystem to offer new functions and features powered by generative AI models.
One of the most useful features of Apple Intelligence is the Writing Tools system. It’s available system-wide across iOS and macOS, allowing you to write, proofread, summarize, and rewrite text. It will help you write emails, captions, articles, essays, and documents much faster.
With the Image Playground system, you can now easily generate AI images for your projects. This system supports three different styles of image generation—Sketch, Animation, and Illustration.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is also integrated into this system. When Apple Intelligence needs assistance, it will get help from ChatGPT and you will be able to access it without needing an OpenAI account.
These new AI features will be integrated into Apple’s various apps like Keynote, Pages, Notes, and Messages, allowing you to easily generate text and images directly from within those apps.
Deep, Private AI Integration
Privacy is a major concern of using AI for many people. Most AI tools and chatbots available today have access to user data and use it to train their AI models. Apple has addressed these concerns by making Apple Intelligence more private.
Much like most other aspects of the Apple ecosystem, Apple Intelligence also takes a privacy-focused approach by creating a system called Private Cloud Compute, which is used only to fulfill your requests and user data never gets stored.
This privacy-focused Apple Intelligence system is deeply integrated into iOS and macOS to help boost your productivity by taking action on your behalf.
You will be able to perform tasks much faster with the help of AI across many apps. For example, you can now say “Pull up the files John shared with me last week” to instantly bring up files related to projects. Or say “Show me all the photos of me and my dog” to view photos with only you and your dog.
Smart Script on iPad
The Notes app on iPad has been enhanced further with the new Smart Script feature, which improves your handwritten notes to look even smoother. It will smoothen out your scribbled notes with Pencil to make text easier to read while maintaining your handwriting style.
You can even paste text into the app and it will automatically look like your handwriting. You can also scratch out sections in your text to erase. As well as rearrange sentences, paragraphs, and add spaces by simply dragging text around using the Pencil.
This will be a game-changer for creatives who prefer taking handwritten notes.
Tiled Windows in macOS Sequoia
The latest version of macOS is dubbed Sequoia and it also comes with many new AI-powered features and tools to enhance productivity. But one feature that Mac users will truly appreciate is the new Tiled Windows function.
Taking inspiration from Microsoft Windows, Apple has introduced this feature to make it much easier for you to keep multiple windows open and well-organized on your screen.
You can now drag a window to a corner of the screen it will automatically fit into a tiled position.
If you’re a fan of multi-tasking, this new Tiled Windows system will surely come in handy.
iPhone Mirroring on Mac
Similar to the Phone Link system on Windows, macOS now also supports an iPhone mirroring system. This system, however, is much more innovative than the Phone Link app on Windows.
Using the iPhone Mirroring system, you can now access your phone’s notifications, access apps, reply to messages, and more, all the while keeping your iPhone in its locked state.
It’s a great solution to keep you from constantly getting distracted by your phone notifications. Well, you will still be using your phone on your Mac, but at least you won’t have to go back and forth between the devices anymore.
Siri with App Intents
Apple has also drastically improved Siri with new capabilities powered by advancements in AI. The biggest change in Siri is the ability to type to Siri. If you don’t feel like speaking out loud, you can now simply type to give commands to Siri.
Apple will be improving Siri with new features over the course of the next few months and promises to bring more new capabilities in 2025, including a new feature called On-Screen Awareness.
With On-Screen Awareness, Siri will be able to see information on your screen to perform actions. For example, you can ask Siri to create a contact from a number shown on the screen. Or take various actions inside apps on your behalf.
Availability & Requirements
Apple Intelligence will be available in Fall 2024 in Beta. Not all features will be available right out of the gate. Some of them will only be available next year.
Unfortunately, users who don’t have the latest Apple devices will miss out on these new features as the Apple Intelligence will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 chips.
In Conclusion
While Apple’s Smart Script and deep AI integrations are certainly innovative, most of the other “new” features announced for iOS and macOS were already available on Microsoft Windows and Android for many years.
It almost felt like Apple was finally catching up to its competitors in their own way. Or, maybe they are running out of new ideas? We’ll let you be the judge of that.
You can watch the full WWDC 2024 event to learn more about these announcements. Developers can check out announcements related to APIs here.
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