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Apple WWDC 2014: Tim Cook Unveils Yosemite
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has started, and OS X 10.10, officially named Yosemite, and iOS 8 have been officially unveiled. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, also highlighted iCloud Drive. Although a little late to the party, Apple hopes to compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive."
I am tired of this every year release cycle. Wish they would take a couple of years and swing for the fences on their software.
My gripe is the flat look that's getting pushed into OS X. I'm seriously tired of this plague. I happen to like my 3D composited desktops.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I don't think that's going to be a problem. 99+ % of Mac users probably have no idea what a blue and white G3 is, and the rest knows enough to differentiate the two.
As someone who has worked on several cross platform toolkits I can say that
"cross platform...is the new platform" == marketing bullshit
Congratulations, you've fallen into the trap that so many other techies here at /. have in thinking that this is consumer stuff targeted at YOU.
It isn't.
The people that this is aimed at don't even know what you're talking about when you say 'FTP'. They just want to move their files around easily and transparently. Now they can. They'll like that.
Take a look at the actual tech stuff if you want to gripe or be excited. But the consumer facing stuff will be really interesting to consumers. They like a bit of GUI change as long as it's not too drastic. (Apple isn't moving the buttons or anything, they're just making a few things more accessible and modifying the design a little; this isn't near the magnitude of the change to the Windows Desktop OS.)
Apple is very good at selling things to people. For non-essential goods, there is basically no company on the planet that's better at making money from consumers. What is small potatoes to you is a big upgrade to some. And it's free. That tends to smooth out any rough edges that crop up.
Are you sure? Based on Apple's history, they sure don't seem to mind replacing huge parts of their infrastructure while completely deprecating the old:
Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X
PowerPC to Intel
Carbon to Cocoa
32-bit to 64-bit
I'm not disagreeing with most of these transitions, but they sure don't mind having their application developers rewrite substantial portions of their applications because of the shiny. I wouldn't be surprised if Objective-C was no longer supported in five years.
Objective-C is not technically platform specific either, it just is in practice, because there is no room or reason for yet another wannabe C++-killer. There are already plenty of languages better than C++, another one wont make a difference, so Swift will be like Objective-C, Apple only.
I like the idea of free regular releases too. But the reality is that they don't seem to be able to break much technical ground with these. Like moving to ZFS or integrating virtual reality (kinda serious) .
While it is disappointing that their push towards ZFS fizzled and died, OS X 10.9 did make some serious technical improvements under the hood that go well beyond the competition.
Compressing and decompressing memory pages on the fly being one of them. It's a much (much!) faster operation than paging to disk, and can significantly reduce memory pressure. Many users felt like they had received a free hardware upgrade -- it can be pretty dramatic. AFAIK neither Windows or Linux have transparent page compression like this. Timer coalescing was another significant kernel-level improvement (although certainly one that had been done before on other platforms). App Nap makes some significant adjustments to how threads and processes are allotted compute cycles. The overall effect can be significantly lessened power requirements, particularly on Apple's laptops, leading to increased battery life -- something no other OS vendor that I'm aware of is focussing on in the PC space (mobile being a bit of a different story, of course).
Perhaps not whiz-bang flashy stuff that end users notice first, but some pretty solid under-the-hood technology none-the-less.
Yaz
Of all the things to chastise them about - software updates isn't one of them. There's frequently and consistently BRAND NEW Android phones that don't support software that's been out for months before before the phone is even announced.