iOS 6
Evolutionary, not revolutionary. The sixth generation of Apple’s mobile operating system represents an enhanced major release. The improvements are evident in the eyes of the users that will notice new features, new useful options and pixel-perfect finishing touches that are the result of an obsessive attention to detail. The improvements are evident in the eyes of the developers that will finds a ton of awesome APIs (currently under NDA) that they’ll definitely want to start using in their apps.
And requests like Siri support and Notification Center widgets for third-party apps? Inter-app communication? Multitasking rethink? Home screen redesign? Not yet. Apple is focusing on polishing the experience as we know it and creating a mature ecosystem.

Ecosystem
Until two years ago, it seemed that Apple had forgotten Mac OS X, but in reality was just concentrated on building a strong breakthrough mobile platform for the post-PC era. Apple is not losing interest in the Mac platform, but plans to strengthen its ecosystem all together (iOS, OS X and iCloud). A year ago at WWDC 2011, Steve Jobs presented iOS 5 (a huge improvement), Lion (the iOS-ification of OS X) and introduced iCloud (the key element of the ecosystem evolution). In 2012 Apple unveiled Mountain Lion (the unification of iOS and OS X) and announced annual OS X release cadence, just like iOS. Today we see an iCloud-ification of both platforms.

2012
So what? In 2012, the challenge is not to build the most advanced mobile or desktop operating system, but the most advanced ecosystem. Hardware, software and services have never been as integrated as they are today. Amazon and Samsung are creating their own ecosystem on top of Android. Microsoft is behind in the mobile OS market, but its desktop OS still remains the standard for PCs and is preparing the tablet-laptop convergence with the upcoming Windows 8. The post-PC era has just begun, the tablet (the very real Post-PC device) market is just beginning to take off and will be huge, the ecosystem war is under way.

This week I attended the iOS Tech Talk in Rome (at the Marriott Park hotel) and it’s been a very exciting chance to learn from Apple and other developers. Here’s a little report on the talks I attended.

9:00-9:50 AM
iOS 5 Tech Talk Kickoff
Recommendations and key insights for iOS 5 development. Examples from Apple Design Award 2011 winners.

Push for excellence, work hard, be creative, exceed expectations. Change things.
Stay hungry! Don’t settle for the status quo.
Stop holding back, move things forward.

10:00-10:50 AM
iPhone and iPad User Interface Design
About the user experience design and best practices for optimizing the user interface for the unique characteristics of iOS devices.
Software analysis according to Apple:

• Tell a great story
• What app do?
• Who are the users?
• Where they will use it?
• How the app will feel?
• Look beautiful!
• Define style of your app (Entertainment vs. Utility)

Recommendations (in open order):

• Reduce visual noise!
• Pay attention on each element
• Design touch centric apps. Focus on touch experience.
• The answer to life the universe and everything is 44 points (comfortable minimum size).
• Some iPhone tips. Cell title: bold, 17 points. Subtitle: 15 points. Preview text: 14 points. Detail body: 15 points.
• Use non integral rows to indicate additional data.
• Don’t hide functionality.
• Focus on determining what is essential.
• Fun UI. Make fun experience for user.
• Customize Game Center.
• Is it Apple quality?
• Software development process according to Apple: prototype and iterate, prototype and iterate, prototype and iterate…
• When you have bad reviews, people may not coming back. Be polished from the beginning.
• Tell a great story!

11:00-11:50 AM
Adopting iCloud Storage — Part 1
Practical understanding of how iCloud storage works and how to take advantage of it. Key-Value Store and UIDocument working with iCloud to store app’s documents.

11:50-1:00 PM (Lunch)

1:00-1:50 PM
Understanding AV Foundation
Introduction to the AV Foundation framework, its core concepts, controls and flexibility.

2:00-2:50 PM
Modernizing Your App Architecture with UIKit
iOS 5 introduces enhancements in UIKit to customize the visual presentation of views and controls using new Appearance APIs. Great talk about how to architect an app to use View Controller containers. Jake Behrens has been the speaker of the day!

3:00-3:50 PM
Modern Tools and Techniques for iOS App Development
Practical understanding of the latest techniques and best practices to get the most out of Xcode 4.2. Interesting demonstration on how Storyboarding can help get from concept to a running app faster than ever.

4:00-4:50 PM
Maximizing Location Awareness on iOS
Geofencing, Core Location framework, region monitoring and geocoding to create a narrowed location-relevant experience for users. Best practices and testing techniques.

5:00-5:50 PM
Your iOS App Performance Hitlist
Make the app feel fastThe best iOS apps are not only beautiful and well designed, they also launch quickly, present a highly responsive interface, and use memory efficiently. Recommendations on the techniques to diagnose and fix common performance problems and the performance hit-list to apply before an app goes out the door.
“Stay safe, stay low”

6:00-7:00 PM (Wine and cheese)

Impeccable organization, interesting technical talks on the newest innovations in iOS 5, the feeling of being for a day at the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), but especially an incomparable chance to talk, exchange views and discuss with other developers.