WWDC 2019: The Pregame Quiz
Dark mode, Marzipan and who knows what else await us which means we’re not far from Tim Cook and Friends revealing iOS 13 to the world. With a ton of services announcements already taken care of such as Apple TV+, Apple News+ and more - the tea leaves indicate that they’re going hard on pure API news this year.
At this point it’s all conjecture, so let’s ready up with the fifth annual Swiftjective-C WWDC Pregame Quiz!
If you’d like a quick primer on how this all works or how it got started, check out the first four quizzes from 2015 ,2016, 2017 and 2018.
Now - Lets.Play(with:🔥)!
Ground Rules
There are three rounds, and the point break down is as follows:
- Round 1 – 1 point each answer
- Round 2 - 2 points each answer
- Round 3 - 3 points each answer
The last question of each round is an optional wildcard question. Get it right, and your team gets 4 points, but miss it and the team will be deducted 2 points.
Round 1 — Swift Decisions
Question 1:
What’s the name of the Swift attribute, added in Swift 5 to bolster dynamic language interoperability, that allows one to call named types like you’d call functions using a simple syntactic sugar?
Example:
@(the attribute name) struct SwiftjectiveC
{
func showArticles(withTags: [String]) {}
}
let instance = SwiftjectiveC()
instance("Foundation", "Swift")
// This will desugar down to instance.showArticles(withTags: ["Foundation", "Swift"])
Question 2:
In Swift, variables are initialized before they are used by a concept enforced by LLVM’s optimizer. What is this concept in computer science referred to as?
Question 3:
SIMD Vector and Result types were finally added to Swift in an official capacity in what version?
Question 4:
Before Apple’s Swift was announced, there already existed a parallel programming language by the same name - who were its developers?
Wildcard:
Before Swift was a popular programming language at Apple, it was also the codename for an Apple-designed processor - which one was it?
Round 2 — iOS History 101
Question 1:
Auto Layout, long a core component of laying out user interfaces on macOS, didn’t arrive on iOS until which major release?
Question 2:
Security is a hallmark feature of iOS, and this specific feature involves placing data in random locations in memory and works alongside ARM’s XN (Execute Never) feature to prevent buffer overflow attacks - what is it?
Question 3:
When iOS was still shrouded in secrecy within Apple, how old was the youngest engineer working on iOS 1.0?
Question 4:
When the iPhone was first launched on June 29th, 2007 its operating system wasn’t yet referred to as iOS until iOS 4. What was its original name?
Wildcard:
Leading the way to haggle all of your friends who appear as green bubbles in your conversations, in which version of iOS did iMessage debut?
Round 3 — Apple Myth and Lore
Question 1:
Leading up to its March 25th, 2019 “It’s Showtime” keynote, Apple live streamed Carplay displaying a six hour ride - where was its end destination?
Question 2:
Steve Jobs, long known as being a master of details, hotly debated what aspect of an Apple Store’s bathroom signs?
Question 3:
What was the very first thing ever rendered in a Safari browser, produced by Ken Kocienda during its development?
Question 4:
To ensure that a visiting Ross Perot wouldn’t think Apple and its employees were too rich for investment - Steve Jobs had himself and Randy Adams hide what objects before he arrived?
Wildcard:
What original Apple employee quickly sold off their 10% share of the company in 1977 for only $800 (which would be worth billions today)?
Answer Key
Round 1:
- @dynamicCallable
- Definitive Initialization.
- Swift 5.
- The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
- Wildcard: The Apple A6 and A6X chips.
Round 2:
- iOS 6.
- Address Space Layout Randomization.
- 18 years old, Scott Goodson.
- iPhone OS.
- Wildcard: iOS 5.
Round 3:
- Cupertino.
- The shade of gray they should be colored as.
- A black obelisk! Fun fact, it actually rendered in the wrong direction.
- Their Porsche 911s
- Wildcard: One of its oft forgotten co-founders, Ronald Wayne.