WWDC 2015 Roundup

Here's an overview of the main announcements and new products unveiled at WWDC today.

• The latest OS X will be named OS X El Capitan. Features include: Natural language searches and auto-arrange windows. You can make the cursor bigger by shaking the mouse and pin sites in Safari now. 1.4x faster than Yosemite. Available to developers today, public beta in July, out for free in the fall.
• Metal, the graphics API is coming to Mac. "Metal combines the compute power of OpenCL and the graphics power of OpenGL in a high-performance API that does both." Up to 40% greater rendering efficiency.
• iOS 9: New Siri UI. There’s an API for search. Siri and Spotlight are getting more integrated. Siri getting better at prediction with a far lower word error rate. You can make checklists, draw and sketch inside of Notes. Maps gets some love. New app called News "We think this offers the best mobile reading experience ever." Like Flipboard it pulls in news articles from your favorite sites. HomeKit now supports window shades, motion sensors, security systems, and remote access via iCloud. Public Beta for iOS 9.
• Apple Pay: All four major credit card companies and over 1 million locations supporting Apple Pay as of next month. Apple Pay reader developed by Square, for peer-to-peer transactions. Apple Pay coming to the UK next month support in 250,000 locations including the London transportation system. Passbook is being renamed "Wallet."
• iPad: Shortcuts for app-switching, split-screen multitasking and QuickType. Put two fingers down on the keyboard and it becomes a trackpad. Side by side apps. Picture in picture available on iPad Air and up, Mini 2 and up.
• CarPlay: Now works wirelessly and supports apps by the automaker.
• Swift 2,the latest version of Apple’s programing language . Swift will be open source.
• The App Store: Over 100 billion app downloads, and $30 billion paid to developers.
• Apple Watch: watchOS 2 with new watch faces. Developers can build their own "complications" (widgets with a terrible name that show updates and gauges on the watch face). A new feature called Time Travel lets you rotate the digital crown to zoom into the future and see what’s coming up. More new features: reply to email, bedside alarm clock, send scribbled messages in multiple colors. You can now play video on the watch. Developer beta of watchOS 2 available today, wide release in the fall for free.
• Apple Music: “The next chapter in music. It will change the way you experience music forever,” says Cook. Live DJs broadcasting and hosting live radio streams you can listen to in 150 countries. Handpicked suggestions. 24/7 live global radio. Beats Connect lets unsigned artists connect with fans. Beats Music has all of iTunes’ music, to buy or stream. With curated recommendations. Launching June 30th in 100 countries with Android this fall, with Windows and Android versions. First three months free, $9.99 a month or $14.99 a month for family plan for up to six.

Comments

24/7 Live Global Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

"Live DJs broadcasting and hosting live radio streams you can listen to in 150 countries" -- So in other words, Apple re-invented shoutcast?

Complications

[Anonymous Coward]

If you knew anything about watches, you would know that "complication" is the horological term for an additional feature on a watch.

Can someone translate "1.4x faster?"

[chispito]

Can someone translate "1.4x faster?" Is that 240% the speed of Yosemite, or is that 140% the speed of Yosemite?

Re:Does El Capitan Fix Major Problems?

[tlhIngan]

-Can we have an OS that doesn't feel like it is from the early 90s?

You can blame the "journalists" for that one.

Basically the big reason why iOS made the change to flatness and why flatness is the new hotness is because some very big loudmouths started saying they hated the way everything looked the same as it did before.

I believe the term bandied about was "stale". As in "iOS6 - the same old iOS that looks the same as it did since 2007. Stale, compared to the flashy updates to the UI Android makes, or the radical flatness of Windows phone". Ditto OS X.

Of course, everyone who's ever worked in UI knows people like UIs to, well, not change - that some menu option will always be located in the same place, that things generally look the same. If there's a change, there had better be a damn good reason for the change.

TL; DR: Some loudmouth bloggers, journalists, etc., hated the way things looked the same and called it stale and needed refreshing. Apple obliged and the "new UI" was adored by said loudmouths. And hated by everyone else didn't think it was stale, but functional.

What about all the competing content sources?

[ErichTheRed]

Far be it from me to throw cold water on an idea, but I do have an observation. One of the byproducts of the mobile/social/web 3.0/content dotcom boom is the sheer number of different content providers that offer a library of movies, music and TV shows. Amazon offers Prime Instant Video plus for-purchase titles, Google has the Play Store, Netflix offers streaming, Hulu offers streaming, Spotify offers streaming, Microsoft is offering content, and now Apple offers a mix of both like Amazon does. (Fun fact, you pay a couple more dollars in Apple tax for the same content if you use iTunes rather than Amazon to buy some movies.)

The question is -- when will the Great Consolidation happen? Now that everyone is opting to license their content rather than pay for physical media, will there come a day when all the competing App Stores, Music Stores and Movie Streaming Services start merging, and what will happen to the content when that happens? It just seems to me that having Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and all the TV providers maintaining their own separate content libraries can't be sustainable. Nor will people want to purchase subscriptions from all of them, or the Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Google TV, etc etc etc

Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive

[jeremyp]

Wait, you guys (Apple developers) have to pay *licenses* to Apple to write programs and apps on their platforms?

No.

You can get Xcode and all the SDKs for free either through the app store or by registering as a developer (free). You pay $100 for the ability to sign your compiled applications. On OS X this means people who download your compiled binaries won't get a warning that the code is unsigned.

On iOS you can't put unsigned code on any device, not even your own, without the signing cert so to do serious development, you need to pay $100 (your code will run in the simulator without signing, but the simulator runs x86 binaries so it's not a proper test of the code's behaviour on a real device). This isn't really a big deal because to develop for iOS you must have a Mac and some sort of iOS device so you can probably afford $100.

The $100 also gives you early access to all betas, so I could install El Cap now, if I wanted (I don't), however, over the last year or so, for me it's been most useful for access to Swift betas. The early versions of the Swift development environment were tragically unstable and produced code that was quite slow. You had to be on the bleeding edge to get all the bug fixes.