One of my favorite sessions to watch from WWDC each year is the What's new with Xcode. As I quickly scanned the videos from this year I realized it was missing. What gives?

As I’ve been making my way through the videos though, I have realized that it is there, just in a much more subtle way.

The pre-recorded session videos allow for a much tighter experience. Not only can more content be shared in the same amount of time, but how it is shared can be altered. I have only seen a couple of instances so far where a code snippet was used to drop in a huge piece of code (I’m looking at you Core ML). Instead, most of the presenters actually typed, in “real time”, the code they were demonstrating. I think this is a huge improvement to the sessions of previous years where the new features were given as a bulleted list. I loved learning about the new features and tools in Xcode simply by watching someone use them in a normal context. Having these distributed out among so many of the videos also feels like they were able to share more of the changes that were made.

While it’s clear that my favorite video was missing from WWDC this year, it is just as clear that it doesn’t need to be there. The general consensus seems to be that the sessions were well received this year, and I have to agree. I really hope that this is something we can continue to expect from WWDC in the years to come.