Apple WWDC: iOS 5, Lion, iCloud

Steve Jobs was on hand today to kick off Apple's WWDC keynote. Lion took the lead, with no surprises except a $29.99 pricetag and a July ship date. iOS is getting a new "Notification Center"; Twitter is being integrated; he announced a split thumbable keyboard for iPads; wireless syncing; and a native IM system for iOS devices, shipping in the Fall. iCloud will be free, syncing apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts and iWork apps) across devices. Photostream is iCloud for pictures. iTunes iCloud will let you re-download your tracks at last, and iTunes Match will let you match your ripped CDs to Apple's copies.

Comments

Re:Xcode ...

[slimjim8094]

They did. Delta updates in App Store. All the devs in the room applauded, for precisely the reason you mentioned.

Re:Matching my music with iTunes store?

[Americano]

From the Apple iCloud web page, up shortly after the WWDC keynote finished:

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

Italics/Bold sentence above emphasized by me.

If your music is already in the Itunes store, the match service will let you avoid having to upload it, and you might be able to upgrade the quality. If it's not in the itunes store, you can still upload it to the service, and have your non-mainstream stuff available to you in the same way, but you won't get the upgraded bitrate that a matched song might get you. I know I have a bunch of old, comparatively low-bitrate, mp3's in my collection... an upgrade of even half of them to 256kbps for the cost of a few minutes scanning my library and $25/yr doesn't sound like an unreasonable price when you factor in the time required to re-rip a couple hundred CDs at a higher bitrate.

Re:I skipped Snow Leopard

[MachineShedFred]

It's an app that you get from the app store. You copy /Applications/Install Mac OS X.app to your media of choice. This is how it has worked since the first developer preview like 5 months ago.