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Our Week in San Jose

It’s the WWDC post you’ve been waiting for

by Team Lickability
A Photo of the McEnery Convention Center at lunchtime, filled with developers.

If you spent any time on the internet last week, you may have noticed that a few of us were in San Jose for a little event known as WWDC. Now we’re back, and we can’t wait to tell you all about it!

#WWDC18 🎉

mb, Brian, and Jillian (hi 👋) all flew out to California for a smattering of conferences, live podcast recordings, and pin exchanges. mb was Lickability’s person in the field at WWDC all week, while Brian and Jillian attended Layers for three days of snacks, fun design talks, and more snacks.

Photo of the WWDC keynote showing a wall of app icons.

You know what it is.

Everyone back at Lickability HQ enjoyed WWDC too. The day of the keynote, we had mb watching at the conference center, Brian and Jillian watching via iPad in a hotel room, and the rest of the team watching on the big screen over pizza back in New York.We’re all still catching up on WWDC videos, but here are some of our favorites from last week:

What’s New in Swift

Michael Liberatore:

I love seeing Apple highlight the open source efforts of the community, and Swift’s constant quality-of-life improvements have me excited for the future. I ❤️ Case​Iterable, and that Equatable and Hashable can now be synthesized!

Designing Fluid Interfaces

mb Bischoff:

I liked Designing Fluid Interfaces because they showed a ton of custom rendered videos that explained how and why they made the iPhone X feel so fluid to use.

Getting the Most out of Playgrounds in Xcode

Michael Amundsen:

I don’t use Playgrounds much, but I think they did a good job at explaining some real world use cases of why you should use them even as part of a normal project.

The Life of a Button

mb Bischoff:

It takes something so small (a single button) and walks through the entire design process of how it should work, behave, be titled, etc.

Adding Delight to Your iOS App

mb Bischoff:

It made me think a lot about “Layout Driven UI” which is not something I’d seen written about or described much before.

Michael Liberatore:

I really like these kinds of sessions that are not introducing anything new, API-wise, but provide alternative ways to think about writing code with the same frameworks and tools.

We also ❤️ Layers

None of the talks from Layers are available to watch online (yet), but we want to give a special shout-out to a few of our favorites: Majd Taby gave a very moving talk about his journey toward co-founding Darkroom and creating Displaced; Litha Soyizwapi’s story about developing and designing the GauRider app was inspiring; Ryan McLeod had a magical presentation about sleight of hand in digital design; and Jessica Hische is a fantastic speaker and one of our favorite people. If you get a chance to go to Layers next year, do it.

Here we go! 😅🤞🏻#layersconfpic.twitter.com/0NRB0KESl7

— Ryan McLeod (@warpling) June 6, 2018

See you next year! 👋

A Lickability dinner at The Farmers Union with friends.

A very lickable dinner at The Farmers Union 👅

We were lucky enough to catch up with a bunch of our friends while we were in San Jose, and even luckier to meet so many people we didn’t know before. One of our goals for the week was to hand out Lickability pins and stickers to as many people as possible, and we definitely pulled it off — we don’t have a single Lickability pin left. If you got one, give us a shout-out on Twitter or Instagram so we can see it in its new home! And if you didn’t get one, let us know — we’ll make sure you get one next time.