Later today, Apple will open its WWDC conference and announce a slew of enhancements to its operating systems, iOS 13, macOS 10.15, watchOS 6 and tvOS.
As a company, Apple has always been a huge proponent of the PDF format since Mac OS X launched in 2001 and in fact built its Quartz graphics rendering on top of Adobe Imaging Model (aka PDF) in order to provide full support for text anti-aliasing and transparency/opacity.
Fast-forward 18 years later and both iOS and macOS have excellent built in support for PDF including functions such as mark-up and annotation tools as well as printing to PDF documents.
So what are the two features that we would like to see Apple add to PDF support in iOS 13 and watchOS 6?
JavaScript Support in PDF Files
JavaScript support in PDF is very important as it provides the ability to add interactive functionality to PDF documents. Examples of this include the ability to add an expiry date to a PDF so that a message can be displayed if the PDF is opened after a certain date or to add data validation for PDF forms. At the moment, adding any Javascript functions to PDF is not guaranteed to work on iOS or macOS unless the user downloads third-party applications such as PDF Expert (iOS) or Adobe Acrobat Reader (macOS).
Ability to View PDF Files on Apple Watch
This may sound crazy at first but bear with me. One common task I use my Apple Watch for is triaging my email inboxes by flagging important emails to read later and deleting junk emails. As is the case, some emails contain PDF attachments and at the moment, I am unable to view. It would therefore be very useful to have the ability to view a preview of PDF files on the Apple Watch to aid in the triaging process.
What features are looking forward to the most from WWDC 2019? Drop us a tweet to let us know!