Apple Announces iCloud and iWork For iOS

iONiUM writes "Through a press release ahead of WWDC, Apple has revealed that it will be releasing its own cloud service to rival Google and Amazon's. In addition, they will unveil the new iOS, and the latest desktop OS." Apple also announced the release of the iWork suite for iOS devices.

Comments

Looking forward to Lion

[hackertourist]

Autosave, Version and Resume are major improvements, and long overdue for desktop OSes.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[betterunixthanunix]

That depends on your definition of "systemwide." I doubt that every program that runs on Mac OS X will have autosave or resume functionality; it will probably involve some sort of hook into the system. Such a framework existed in KDE3, where KDE applications could all resume after KDE was restarted (and this probably exists in KDE4), and all KDE applications had autosave (as far as I know).

Now, if Apple has written an operating system that enables autosave and resume for any application, even X11 applications, I will be very impressed.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[macs4all]

Sure, versioning has been around forever. But autosave, and preserving system state through a restart? I've seen both done on a per-application basis, but not systemwide.

Then I guess you missed Lisa 7/7 (also the world's first integrated office application(s)). That lighted power switch on the front of the Lisa? If it was running the LisaOS (instead of MacOS), pressing that button performed a system save and shutdown, and pressing it again did a restart and reboot. This two-part video here and here shows just how advanced the Lisa was. In fact, that (and the hideous price) was (were) the two main reasons the Lisas became landfill, instead of a household name. And there's no denying that it paved the way for the desktop/windowing metaphor.

BTW, notice that even in the first incarnation of the Lisa OS, it allowed for heirachical folders. That feature didn't appear in Windows until Windows 95. Amazing.

Designed starting in 1978. Released in 1983. I think they won.

And before someone starts all that bullshit about "Apple stole Xerox PARC's work", let me say this: 1) Apple PAID Xerox for to use their work. And 2) Without the improvements (not the least of which was pulldown menus!) that some very talented engineers made, that preliminary GUI work would not have become really useable, let alone nearly ubiquitious.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[pandrijeczko]

I own an Asus EEE PC netbook that's a couple of years old now and I run Linux on it.

The other day, I accidentally closed the lid while it was powered on and I was quite surprised to discover that Hibernate seemed to work quite well on it - up to that point, I'd never given Hibernate a second thought.

After I sat down and thought about it for a while, I decided that if my life was so chock full of shit to do that 30 seconds to wait for my netbook to boot fully from a power on was far too long, then I probably need to go do some serious time management in my life overall.

The point I'm trying to make is that despite the fact that the Hibernate feature works okay, I don't use it - let alone a Hibernation that also survives a reboot.

People seem to place such importance on useless features that are only there because those same people don't organise themselves better - a bit of a paradox if you think about it.

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[MaskedSlacker]

So...they reinvented hibernate?

Re:Looking forward to Lion

[betterunixthanunix]

It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.

Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.

Their entire state is saved, so restarting a program just reloads the memory

Can you cite a source here? That is a very complex thing for an OS to do, on the level of a live kernel upgrade (i.e. upgrading a kernel without having to reboot). If this is what the OS is doing, and if the OS is doing it without requiring the application to make any special system calls to enable that functionality, it would be impressive.

Re:Let me be the first to foresee...

[Anonymous Coward]

"iCloud... When it is down, that is actually a feature."

When it's down, it's called iFog.

Re:When will there be too many "i"s?

[InsertWittyNameHere]

They should call it "Apple Mac OS X Cloud 2011 Premium Home Edition R2 SP1"

Re:What are the odds

[leamanc]

Typically, Apple uses BSD boxen when they are not using OS X Server. Since OS X's kernel has some BSD heritage, that doesn't seem too out of line. I think they only time Apple stuff has been identified as being served up from Linux has been on third-party hosting services like Akamai.

Re:When will there be too many "i"s?

[ArcherB]

I'm a huge Apple fan, but even I think this stuff with the "i" branding is just stupid and faintly embarrassing. Every Apple product has a fraeking "i" before it's otherwise utterly unimaginative name? "iCloud" - FFS.

Well, they used to start everything with "Mac", but too many people would be saying "there can be only one" if they called it MacCloud.

Re:When will there be too many "i"s?

[NameIsDavid]

If you ran the company, would you throw away the brand value of "i" just for the sake of being imaginative? When you here "i" anything, you know the product is Apple. Most companies would kill for that level of brand recognition.

Re:When will there be too many "i"s?

[Hijacked Public]

I would prefer everything be named with a version number, an animal name, and an adjective. That way when I look for software some people will list compatibility by the version number, some by the animal name, and some by adjective.

If the adjective starts with the same letter as the animal name and an acronym is appended to the version number that is doubly awesome. Also if the OS would take pains to hide some or all of the descriptors...like that too.

Re:What are the odds

[pandrijeczko]

I wish that were the case.

I have no idea where you are in the world but if you're not in the UK (where you can watch it now on iPlayer on the BBC 3 web site), look out for the first in a series of documentaries called "The Secrets Of The Superbrands".

The first one is about technology companies and Apple feature heavily in it.

One particular disturbing scene (to me at least) shows fanbois sleeping rough outside of an Apple store in London overnight, not because of a new product launch the next day but because it was a NEW APPLE STORE opening the next day. Amongst the people queuing were fanbois who had flown in especially from Turkey, China and California.

If that is not the behaviour of disturbed religious cultists then I don't know what is.

iWork for iOS (summary clarification)

[FunnyStrange]

Not seeing this upthread, but might be redundant by now: The iWork announcement was for the "small" iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch). Those apps have been available for iPad (also iOS) for over a year. The update makes them universal. If you own them for iPad, they'll now work on the other devices (it's a free upgrade).

Re:When will there be too many "i"s?

[dzfoo]

I am Juan MacCloud from the clan MacCloud. I am El Hilandero... There can be only Juan.