The Bigtincan team was fortunate to attend the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose this past week, and what an event it was.
These annual events are the core (no pun intended) of Apple’s strategy of introducing new software and capabilities to their iOS and Mac OS (as well as other solutions).
Some years it’s more about performance and smaller advancements, but this year was a BIG ONE. iOS 13, Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, and watchOS 6 are significant advancements.
Let's talk about what you should know.
What’s New?
One of the first things that Apple released was updated software for the iPad that is now making it different enough from the iPhone version that it has a new name - iPadOS.
iPadOS introduces a bunch of new features that Bigtincan will be able to leverage including:
- Support for the ‘pinning’ of Bigtincan's "Today Widget" to the iPad home screen.
- New single sign on (SSO) options including a new screen that allows for logins that don't just run in a pop-up web view.
- Enhancements to Siri that we will be using in the Bigtincan Genie virtual sales assistant.
- Support for an external mouse - yes a mouse - that keeps moving the iPad towards being a laptop replacement for enterprise workers.
Dark Mode is coming to the iPhone and iPad which is pretty cool, and with changes to multitasking, it will be even easier to use the Bigtincan solutions on all Apple platforms.
Apple also announced a bunch of new developer tools like SwiftUI and new XCode that will help teams to build a better, higher quality, and a more feature reach solution faster than ever before.
All great stuff - but for many of us who use Apple laptops in our daily work, the biggest news was Apple announcing that they will be providing tools that can be used to create a native Mac version of our iPad app.
For Bigtincan users, you will be able to run Bigtincan Hub and Bigtincan Zunos natively on a Mac entirely offline.
When do we get it?
All the new operating systems announced are due to release in the northern hemisphere in the Fall (end September or so), However, we already have early test versions and can confirm that our apps are already running great on them. See the video here.
Keep an eye out for new production versions of our solutions later in 2019 that take advantage of these new capabilities!
