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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've just finished watching this. There were so many new features introduced that I have no idea how other companies are going to compete with this. I bet that one year in the future, they won't have even 25% of those features matched.
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.
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.
I'm not sure which of these technologies will be successful in the coming months, but I am certain that before the year is over we will see many job postings requiring 3 years experience with Swift.
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.
Because they are finally admitting that Microsoft has superior UI design and they are trying to catch up.
It's not that much of an illusion. Qt's done some useful work there. I've written one app, quite complex, that runs under both Windows and OSX. The only serious work I had to do was related to USB support, which Qt really hasn't addressed worth a darn. Everything else, though, is just a recompile specifying the target. Sound, networking, file system, GUI and lower level graphics, etc. The apps are a little less efficient, working as they must through a compatibility layer, but they're efficient enough to do the job at hand on even moderately recent hardware, so I'm pretty happy with the whole approach.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get 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.
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.
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
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
you seem to know what you're talking about. can you explain this idea of memory compression, and what the heck the new activity monitor means? the old one made sense. Pie chart, showing free, available, and active. Now it's apparently using up all my memory I have 8 GB but it shows a line chart with a small amount of "memory pressure".
Sure -- I'll try to explain it the best I can. I won't make any specific judgements as to whether the new controls are better than the old, except to point out that there is more useful information in the new that wasn't present in the old. You're still perfectly welcome to prefer the old pie chart :). I'll try not to stray too far into the esoteric; if you need more details on a specific subject here, feel free to ask.
First a bit on the theory of memory management in general. In most modern operating systems like Mac OS X, each application appears to get it's own memory space, starting at '0' and running up to 0xffffffffffffffff (a fancy way of saying the addresses go from 0 to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.84*10E19 bytes of memory). To make things easier to deal with, the operating system breaks these up into chunks 4096 bytes in size called a 'page'. Now 1.84*10E19 bytes is probably way more memory than you have available on your system, but that's okay -- while conceptually an application can use any of that memory space for pretty much anything it wants, the operating system keeps track only of which pages have actually been allocated to each application. This system is called 'virtual memory': each application has its own virtually memory space to play with that doesn't interact with he memory of any other application. This is the value that shows in the "virtual memory" box in the activity monitor.
Now of course, you have real, physical memory in your machine, and you don't have a separate set for each application (in a physical sense -- you don't have one set of chips for Safari, and another set of chips for iPhoto, for example). The real memory has to hold the virtual memory somehow, and be able to map from one to the other. The operating system keeps a structure known as the Translation Lookaside Buffer that keeps this mapping for pages stored in physical memory. So it might have a bunch of entires for Safari, saying that the page consisting of what the application sees as memory area starting at 0x0000 and going to to 0x0FFF are stored in memory location 0x40000000 (the 1GB mark), the page of what the application sees as memory area starting at 0x1000 and going to 0x1FFF are in location 0x40096000, etc. In fact, the pages can be all over the place, and not even in order -- the operating system keeps track of all the used memory pages for the application wherever they are stored in memory. The amount of physical memory you have shows in the "Physical Memory" box of the activity monitor.
If you don't get all that, don't worry -- the main takeaway is that these pages can be stored in memory, and the operating system tracks of them when they are. Because we work with all of these pages, however, the operating system can also store them someplace else. Prior to Mavericks, this was always written to disk in the "swap" file (also sometimes known as a "page file"). This happened when memory pressure gets higher than the operating system can handle in RAM alone; that is, programs are asking for more virtual pages than the operating system can fit into real memory. To try to make room for new requests without unloading applications, the operating system will periodically go through the list of pages if memory pressure is high, find the least-used pages (you might have some application running that you put into the background and haven't touched in hours, for example, or applications which have reserved pages for things such as documents you haven't looked at in hours, even if you've otherwise used the application itself), and write them to disk. This is known as "swap". The pages of c