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."

Comments

A new programming language

[eminencja]

Yosemite will feature a new icon set. A bigger news is Swift, a new, safe programming language with type inference. Anyone who is able to find a language reference manual (supposedly available on iBooks) will get a lot of mod points.

Re:A new programming language

[TechyImmigrant]

>A bigger news is Swift, a new, safe programming language with type inference.

I just took a quick look through the swift language manual on iBooks.
I like it. It seems to lose some of the annoying features of objective-c and bring in some of the nice features of python.

E.G. for i in 0..3 { stuff }; or: for i in list_of_things { stuff }; like python.
and tuples allowing multiple return values, like in python
and it gets rid of the annoying square bracket method call syntax of objective C, replacing it with normal dot notation. classinstance.methodname()
and passing functions as arguments like fancy languages
and getting rid of the need for semicolons, like python
and type inference from literals in variable declarations.

And one more thing - NOT

[Animats]

Kind of a "meh" series of announcements. The Mac interface will look more like the phone interface. (How'd that work out for Microsoft?) FTP that goes through Apple's servers. A new GUI theme. Some other routine GUI churn. A medical interface app with sensors. That's it?

Last week, Apple execs were promising big announcements, the biggest since the Jobs era. This is all they've got? From the hype, you'd expect a competitor for Google Glass, or a VR system, or a rugged phone with no connectors and inductive charging, or an AI system that runs your life, or NSA-proof security, or something really new, like a direct brain interface or displays in contact lenses.

Re:And one more thing - NOT

[nine-times]

The Mac interface will look more like the phone interface. (How'd that work out for Microsoft?)

Well it *looks* more like their phone interface, largely in that it uses a simplified and more "flat" design. Microsoft's problem was that they tried to make their new interface *behave* like their phone interface.

FTP that goes through Apple's servers.

Well it's more like a Dropbox competitor, I believe, but with better hooks into the OS for both the desktop and phone. That still might be unimpressive, but it's not the same as a FTP.

Last week, Apple execs were promising big announcements, the biggest since the Jobs era.

Were they definitely talking about this conference, or were they just saying that they have major things in the pipeline? I'm honestly asking, because I didn't see the quotes you're talking about, and they apparently still have new iPhone/iPad models to announce, as well as the rumored smartwatch. Also, some of their products (e.g. Mac minis) should be receiving updates soon, and it's possible there are redesigns coming. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new thinner 4K Thunderbolt display soon.

From the hype, you'd expect a competitor for Google Glass, or a VR system, or a rugged phone with no connectors and inductive charging, or an AI system that runs your life...

So your idea of "innovating" and "groundbreaking" is a me-too Google Glass product, or inductive charging? That stuff actually doesn't sound innovative to me at all. If you really want inductive charging, you can get a case for that, but I think most people have found that it's not all it's cracked up to be. But an AI that runs your life-- their new home automation stuff, in combination with Siri, edges slightly closer to that kind of thing. Real AI is still a ways out, and I'd expect it to come in small incremental changes instead of a fully fledged AI being announced all at once.

Meanwhile, Apple has announced health monitoring and home automation. They've announced a new programming language. They've announced various incremental improvements throughout their software lineup. Also interesting, though not unprecedented, is the "Mail Drop" feature, which will automatically throw files onto their "iCloud Drive" Dropbox competitor and include a link to that file in lieu of email attachments. But what I find most interesting is the description of the "Continuity" interaction between various Apple devices-- that your iPhone, iPad, and Mac might all start talking to each other in a more seamless way, allowing you to access the resources of each device from the other devices.

Re:Its Killer Feature

[Yaztromo]

Do you know C? Any desire to implement such a feature in Linux? Seems like a good idea, and your claim of dramatic performance improvement has got me thinking. Perhaps this would be a good way to dip my toes into kernel hacking, and perhaps I'm not the only one thinking that.

Yup -- I even wrote an experimental real-time kernel for the Atmel AT90 a few years back.

To be honest, I have considered it, as I'm also a Linux user (OS X makes a fantastic interface into a bunch of headless Linux servers that do the grunt work around here), and I'd love to have this support there as well. I currently have 285 processes running on my iMac, and while I'm not really putting a lot of memory pressure on the system (7.97GB used out of 8GB, with only 8.76GB of virtual memory active and no swap), however OS X has still managed to compress 395.6MB of memory, and I haven't noticed a thing. Indeed, it's probably saved me from having to page to disk at the moment to the tune of roughly 200MB. That's a lot of pages available for use pretty quickly without the need to load them from disk first.

What's stopping me? Time. I used to do a lot of Open Source software development, and have had a few projects of my own over the years that have seen some moderate success, and would like to contribute more to the community -- but that was before I had a wife, and before we had a child who has a lot of medical needs. After a long day of commercial application development, and driving my daughter from one appointment to another six days a week, my hobbies currently reflect my desire to get out from behind the keyboard and do things outdoors.

I lament that things have gone this way -- there's nothing more I'd love than to do some deeper research on the type of compression algorithms Apple is using in their memory compression scheme (WKdm, re-implement it as part of the Linux kernel, look at algorithms to quickly identify candidates for compression, and all that good stuff. I get giddy just thinking about it -- but the last thing I need on my plate right now is another project.

If someone decides to take this up, they have my moral support. Maybe in a few years I can start working on interesting stuff like this again, but right now it would probably burn me out to take on something of this size.

Yaz

Re:Its Killer Feature

[Yaztromo]

Linux had the likes of zram, zcache, and zswap for years before Mavericks.

zram was only merged into the Linux kernel in 3.14, on March 30, 2014 -- well after Mavericks was released. And it's more about using a portion of compressed memory for swap -- it's a compressed RAM disk for swapping to, and isn't the same as Apple's transparent page compression system.

zswap is much more akin to what Apple's Memory Compression scheme achieves, and it was merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 3.11, which was released on September 2, 2013, just a few weeks before Mavericks was released.

So you have my apologies -- I wasn't aware of zswap until now. If the topic comes up again, I'll ensure I only compare that feature to Windows (which AFAIK still has nothing like this available).

Yaz

Metal

[nneonneo]

One of the updates that folks seem to have overlooked is Metal, Apple's upcoming replacement for OpenGL.

While I think Apple is likely to continue supporting OpenGL for the foreseeable future, it's somewhat worrying that they've decided to just build a brand-new graphics library. It represents a refocusing of their optimization efforts, certainly, so in the future I would expect devs to have to use Metal in order to obtain decent graphics performance. This in turn will make development even harder, especially for cross-platform shops which expect OpenGL to work reasonably well in all environments...