Our Team’s WWDC 2016 Journey: Travel Adventures, Technical Highlights, and Swift 3 Insights

Three members of the Liulishuo engineering team won tickets to WWDC 2016 and spent nine days in San Francisco, documenting both their travel itinerary and technical observations.

Travel highlights include exploring San Francisco’s landmarks such as Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding bicycles along the coast, a road trip on Highway 1 to Carmel Beach, and attending an NBA Finals game.

Silicon Valley visits featured tours of Apple’s headquarters, Stanford University, Facebook’s new campus (including a discussion with engineer Frank), Uber’s headquarters (meeting CEO Travis Kalanick), and Airbnb’s headquarters, where the team experienced the company’s design‑focused culture.

WWDC keynote focused on OS updates across Apple’s platforms and introduced the iPad Playground app for running Swift code, emphasizing openness.

Swift 3 updates were highlighted with code examples showing the new Notification API and the transition from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3:

Swift 2.2:
let LiulishuoUserBecameActiveNotification = "com.liulishuo.userBecameActive"
NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().postNotificationName(LiulishuoUserBecameActiveNotification, object: nil)

Swift 3:
extension Notification.Name {
    static let userBecameActive = Notification.Name("com.liulishuo.userBecameActive")
}
NotificationCenter.default().post(name: .userBecameActive, object: nil)

The team explains why Swift is gradually replacing Objective‑C, advocating for protocol‑oriented programming and value‑type usage. Examples from the LucidDreams demo illustrate defining a Drawable protocol and implementing ImageDrawable, TextDrawable, and future VideoDrawable types to reduce coupling.

Practical cases in the Liulishuo app show how protocols simplify adding a loading view to view controllers and abstract audio player selection, improving maintainability.

Value types (structs and enums) are extensively used in the app’s data and logic layers to enhance stability and readability.

The article also covers iOS 10 extensions, including SiriKit (Intents and Intents UI extensions) and User Notifications extensions (Notification Service and Notification Content), describing their workflows and benefits.

Other WWDC topics discussed are App Transport Security restrictions on non‑HTTPS traffic, new Xcode 8 features such as improved view and memory debugging, and the introduction of XCSourceEditorExtension.

iMessage app updates in iOS 10 and the upcoming Search Ads platform are briefly introduced, noting the auction‑based pricing model and regional rollout plans.

Finally, the team reflects on the overall experience, mentions the strong Chinese presence at the conference, and invites senior iOS engineers to join Liulishuo.