WWDC 2019: The Pregame Quiz

// Written by Jordan Morgan // May 23rd, 2019 // Read it in about 2 minutes // RE: Trivia

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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:

1. @dynamicCallable
2. Definitive Initialization.
3. Swift 5.
4. The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
5. Wildcard: The Apple A6 and A6X chips.

Round 2:

1. iOS 6.
2. Address Space Layout Randomization.
3. 18 years old, Scott Goodson.
4. iPhone OS.
5. Wildcard: iOS 5.

Round 3:

1. Cupertino.
2. The shade of gray they should be colored as.
3. A black obelisk! Fun fact, it actually rendered in the wrong direction.
4. Their Porsche 911s
5. Wildcard: One of its oft forgotten co-founders, Ronald Wayne.