by Jason Snell
Ask Apple extends Apple’s developer support
Apple announced a new series of developer-focused events, Ask Apple, this week:
Ask Apple will be an ongoing series, with the first round of opportunities coming October 17-21. Current members of the Apple Developer Program and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program can register and find information on the schedule by visiting developer.apple.com/events/ask-apple.
When WWDC went entirely virtual, Apple’s developer support team had to get creative about how to provide direct one-on-one contact between internal Apple experts and app developers. This feels like a natural follow-up to that, extending the Slack channels and one-to-one “office hours” across the calendar.
Obviously, Apple engineers can’t be on call 24/7 to talk to developers. Creating a rolling series of events that developers can sign up for seems like a good way to provide help while still letting Apple’s people do their own jobs internally.
Would this have happened were it not for the pandemic forcing the virtualization of three years of WWDC? Probably not, or not as quickly. But, like WWDC itself, it’s the right reinvention and we shouldn’t go back to the way it was.