Dub Dub Daily: Day 4

Welcome back to Dub Dub Daily and day four of WWDC.

Today's Group Labs cover some seriously useful ground.

We're talking Apple Intelligence, Xcode, and SwiftUI.

We'll show you the full lineup in just a minute. But first, our guest.

Productivity is one of those topics that sounds straightforward, until you realize just how deep it goes.

And there's no better person to discuss it with, than Ken Orr from Xcode.

Ken sat down with my colleague Jeff, to dig into what productivity looks like in this era of new developer tools.

And it's the kind of conversation, that'll have you thinking differently about your own workflow.

Here's Jeff and Ken.

Ken Orr, Director of Xcode, thank you for being here and for making time for us. No stranger to SOTU. You've been involved in a lot of these. How many SOTUs have you been in? I have done a couple of these. So for the past five years I've done the recorded SOTUs, which is really fun. And then took a couple years off, did three live ones before that, which was also really fun, electric, and did a number of sessions as well over the years. So probably, 15 years worth of presentations. 15 years, and this is an especially big year for Xcode.

Two big stories this year, intelligence and the daily experience. Let's start with intelligence. Can you very quickly talk about what's going on with intelligence in Xcode? The most important thing it enables is you to, express your ideas more quickly, right? I remember so many times when I'm writing code, having trouble typing it out fast enough, right? That is a problem of the past, now. And so that that is like the most liberating thing and I love it, yeah. What replaces that now? How is that working, today? You can elevate yourself up one level when you're interacting with agents, and so you don't have to be quite as specific as you do with code.

And so you get to express that natural idea. Takes less typing to do that.

You know, so you get to the end result much more quickly, which is really, really satisfying. Could you share an example of what the coding agents can do for developers? Actually I'll tell you how I use them personally. I've adopted this technique where I, ask the agent to basically write out a spec of what it's going to do before it does it.

So it writes the spec out, and then it writes its code and then I have it follow up and create a set of tests, that validate what it wrote, but also make sure that it's testing everything in that spec. That has a couple great side benefits. One, I get documentation that I can actually validate, that it matches my expectations. But also you have this sort of living, breathing definition of what your app does. And that changes over time as you, change the behavior or things don't quite match your expectations. So I've found that technique to be, you know, really great.

Let's roll into a few of the highlights here for the daily experience. Xcode 27, 30% smaller, projects load faster, syncs via iCloud. What are some of the things people are gonna notice first? Well I think the very first thing people will notice, is the new themes in Xcode. Now I'm a UI guy. I love UI. It's something very near and dear to my heart to really finish this off. And so, over the years we've enhanced Xcode for dark mode on macOS and done lots of things. This really kind of is the cherry on top, that lets color go through the entire app, and it's beautiful. And when you first launch it, you'll see glimmers of that color, but if you switch to some of the more fun themes and actually you can create your own, which is really fun, make them really vibrant and bright, you will really, I think, enjoy the experience of being in Xcode.

Lots to unpack this year. What are you most excited for people to check out first? The things that I'm most proud of and excited for people to get their hands on, is the new Device Hub in Xcode. It's something that we have been working on for years and using ourselves for years, and the level of polish on this app and device experience is really, really high. And that's what we want people to be experiencing every day, you know, when they're interacting with devices, which is a lot.

And so, you know, you get your simulators, you get your real devices all in one place, with a really high attention to detail and fantastic experience. So, I think, love people to try that out. You seem to be the guy to ask this. Can you give us some productivity tips? Give me some of your personal tips and tricks for Xcode. I'll tell you some things that, you know, have been in the product for a while that I like, that I think maybe people don't notice. Okay! So, really simple one! Change your insertion point. Use the block insertion point. And why you want to use that? You'll never misplace your insertion point again. You can always see it there blinking. That's an easy one, but people don't know we have that. Another one, that is really great, to control sort of the layout of your Xcode, like where files are and how many splits you have. There's a feature called the destination chooser. They go into settings, go into navigation.

In there, there's a section for navigation. When you press the option key, you can change this little option to say destination chooser. When you hold down option and you click on a file, it will show this blue highlight that you can move around with your cursor. You can say I want to split here, or I want the file to go here, or I want a new window.

Really, really powerful, for both the mouse kind of person, which is me, and also the keyboard kind of person, that likes to control things with the keyboard. That's a good one! Could we do a whole show with this? This is very useful. I feel like we can do this for a while. Thanks so much, Ken and Jeff. Great stuff as always. To learn more, check out the "What's New in Xcode 27" and "Xcode Agents and you" sessions.

Now, to today's Group Labs, running all day long.

Drop in, bring your questions, and if you miss one, it'll be available on demand.

I'm gonna go to the Coding Intelligence Group Lab for beginners, and I'm gonna hang out and pick up some tips and tricks with Xcode at 1pm.

Two more things! If you need inspiration for your next project, look no further than this year's Apple Design Award winners and finalists.

There's all kinds of great creative apps and fun games. So there's something for everyone. Please go check them out.

WWDC is online, but the developer community is everywhere.

Head to developer.apple.com/community, to find local meet-ups, online groups and activities happening all around the world.

After everything I've learned this week, I'm considering delegating day five to an agent. Don't tell my producer.

Alright, that's day four! Join us tomorrow for the final Dub Dub Daily. I'll see you then.