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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.
"Live DJs broadcasting and hosting live radio streams you can listen to in 150 countries" -- So in other words, Apple re-invented shoutcast?
If you knew anything about watches, you would know that "complication" is the horological term for an additional feature on a watch.
(Apple) Worldwide Developers Conference. I had to look it up for myself, so I thought I would post it.
The phrase "complication" is borrowed from watch horology, meaning some function that's unrelated to the basic three functions of the watch, telling the hour, minute, and second. So things like stopwatches, day/date/month displays, moon phase displays, mainspring reserve power, spelling out the time with a series of chimes, that kind of thing. For a mechanical watch, you're cramming in more and more functions into an increasingly small case, so more is more difficult and considered by some to be more admirable.
If you want to see the ultimate example of pre-computer watch design, the Graves Supercomplication is worth reading up on, with 22 functions on both the front and back of the watch.
I really love how we'll be able to turn the dial and see the future. This will be especially powerful when combined with the News app. See what next week's stock market will look like or who will win the next election. Of course, if we know the future it will potentially change the future. This means that the "futures" markets will change depending on the present which depends on the future depending on the present depending on the future which .... Oh, never mind.
*yawn* who cares.... Thought the apple music presentation was pretty terrible not even remotely excited about it.
Latest OS X: Expected, while interesting features nothing huge.
Metal: New Graphic engine... Again! means developers will need to rewrite their apps so they look right with the OS.
iOS 9: Kinda neat. When I get it I will update and play with it.
Apple Pay: Nothing new to me.
iPAD: Sounds like stuff android had for a while.
Car Play: So I have to buy a new car to get this? Sorry I like a car that is good on fuel, dependable, and affordable, if it comes with Car Play great if not no big deal.
Swift 2: Get me a version where I can make apps in Windows or Linux too... Otherwise OK that is fine, but staying to one platform development isn't my thing.
Apple Watch: I still can't find a good reason to get one.
Apple Music: I am looking for ways to reduce my monthly fees. Being that this cost more than Netflix or Hulu and you get less data traffic, it doesn't make sense.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Mavericks and Yosemite introduced a number of really bad bugs and annoyances. Has this fixed some of them?
-Can you access the file dialog with out waiting forever with just the spinning disk showing?
-Does the filesystem update when things like screenshots are taken with out having to force a reload of the filesystem cache?
-Can you lock the dock to a certain position on one screen?
-Can we have it so the HDMI Port stops cutting out?
-Can the screen properly update without black boxes sometimes covering content / UI elements?
-Can we have an OS that doesn't feel like it is from the early 90s?
-Can we have more graphical setup options instead of having to do things through the command prompt?
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Nothing happened at WWDC today.
No, even less than that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
apple is aware of this place called the internet right????
I mean when you have FREE services out there why would you spend 15 bucks a month?
Didnt they learn from Jay-Z???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Can someone translate "1.4x faster?" Is that 240% the speed of Yosemite, or is that 140% the speed of Yosemite?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Looks like paid radio services will have some tough time ahead. Specially for families, the Apple Music will be actually cheaper than Pandora premium. Also, with complete iTune catalog on it, it will be have vastly more content than competitors. And now it works across range of devices, so yet another benefit of using Pandora like services is going away. Not sure what is happening, but this is very very frightening with Apple holding all your eggs.
Agreed, should fail like other attempts for monthly fee based music services. Music to me is hard to ask for money every month. We have it in our cars for free. It doesn't decompose over time. We listen to music that was written years ago and still love it.
This is disgusting.
In what way?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The apple developer program is now all in one instead of paying a separate license or Mac OSX, iOS and Safari. This is good news and makes sense. It was kinda pointless to have a separate license for all these common features between devices/hardware.
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
What's the free equivalent?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Only AMD Macs" would mean they would need to drop support for the Mac mini, most MacBooks and even some iMacs.
But yeah, if there's one thing they didn't say, it was which hardware was going to be left behind with "El Capitan". I'm pretty sure my old Core 2 Duo, nVidia 320m Mac mini isn't going to be on the list of supported hardware.
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Disgusting? Compared to what? The billion of locations that support credit card payment?
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legally? pandora, spotify and many many others. then there are torrents
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They specifically said that iOS 9 will support all the same hardware as 8
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The names comes from horology. Complications are the fancy stuff you get on watches... chronometer, date, moon phase. The more there are the more expensive the watch, but for real watches it actually involves top-notch engineering, not flashing a chip.
Anybody else think that Apple should ditch Metal in favour of Vulkan? If they want the latest games ported to Mac then they should use an open API that is used on other platforms.
But I am starting to think that maybe ports is not Apple's game... Maybe they want there to be almost only Apple-specific titles on Mac so that people wouldn't compare performance on Mac to that on PC or consoles. Now that they are known mostly for laptops and their desktop machines are also having laptop-grade internals then they are not going to be able to compete on graphics performance anyway.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
The OS X v10.11 Developer Beta supports the following Macs:
iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
Xserve (Early 2009)
+1 informative
Also, I'm glad my old Mac mini is still supported! (mid-2010 model)
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"In what way?"
Because NFC was cool only when Europeans had it, but nobody else did. A US company supporting it makes it evil and corporate.
Faster boot up? Faster application launches? Faster searching? What, exactly, is faster?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I've experienced literally none of those things on any of the Macs or iOS devices that I come in contact with daily. Are you certain that those aren't particular to your own system?
I've run across most of those issues at one time or another on Mavericks, on both my work macair and my wife's powerbook (the display port drop-outs are particularly annoying). It isn't helpful to simply dismiss issues people raise ... frankly, it makes you sound like a systemd developer. Better for all of us if these issues are raised and fixed (even if the corporate master in question will never officially admit such issues exist). Then we all win.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've been beta testing this feature and you are right about it being useful with the News and Stockmarket app. It seems buggy though because I can get it to turn past the 2016 NASA news release about an unseen asteroid suddenly passing by the moon heading for earth. The only apps that continues further into the future is the weather app which reports blackout skies, and 2700K surface temperatures with rains of ash and nitric acid. And The health app shows my pulse rapidly rising then flat lining about that time. Facebook shows I was unfriended by the whole world and all the you tubes are of a fireball in the sky, but nothing past that date.
The watch actually allows you to travel into the future as well. It's a beta version so the rate of travel is really slow right now, but you can feel youself travel about 1/sec into the future every 1/sec if you watch mickey mouse's hands. If you put it in developer mode there's also a timetravel stop watch. It freezes the whole world except you. I was using it to rob a bank one day and I dropped it. So I traveled back in time to post this on slashdot to warn everyone about this.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As someone once said "Lame."
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So it's either $10 per person if you're single with only one pay check or $2.50 to $7.50 per person if you're a family with possibly two incomes.
Dear JealousSingleMan, I'll adopt you for $50 a year, so you can qualify for the family plan. Think of the savings!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
apple is aware of this place called the internet right????
I mean when you have FREE services out there why would you spend 15 bucks a month?
Didnt they learn from Jay-Z???
Better notify Spotify. To the batphone Robin
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"legally? pandora, spotify and many many others. then there are torrents"
Neither Pandora nor the free tier of Spotify allow you to create your own playlist of songs.
Where are the free legal equivalents that don't have adverts?
Imagine that, a phone introduced in September 2011, still getting updates....
moving the goalposts???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
For that $50/year do I also get half my mortgage paid, access to a second car when needed, contribution to electricity, gas and water supplies and the cats fed when I'm away for the weekend?
Lets face it, someone else could move into my home and expect me to pay for their life and it'd barely register on my gross monthly outgoings.
An alternative should be comparable. Ad-supported and subscription-based are pretty different types of services catering to different kinds of consumers. It was you who moved to goalposts by stating competitors that were quite different.
Try having kids.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
im not sure that a 30 second ad every few hours is worth 15 bucks a month. for me its not, for most people i know its not.
are we really that short on attention spans than we cant handle a 30 second ad...if it means saving $$180 a year?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Why don't they just provide bug fixes to those old devices? FYI, bug fixes for older devices go away once iOS9 is released. Also stop forcing new apps to be link to the new iOS9. 9 operating system versions in 9 years is crazy fast versioning. Are they planning on slowing down with stable APIs?
Not necessarily. Apple provided a security patch for IOS 6 for the 3GS after iOS 7 came out to fix the goth fail bug.
AFAIK, you can still release software that supports iOS 4.1.2 or at least iOS 5
Ah, good call. The government will give me cash for that too, and pay for someone else to look after them while I'm at work.
I understand that Siri only gets paid 76.5% of what Clippy gets. That hardly seems fair.
What Clippy gets is a good swift kick in the pants. Siri should count herself lucky to only get 76.5% of that.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
im not sure that a 30 second ad every few hours is worth 15 bucks a month. for me its not, for most people i know its not.
are we really that short on attention spans than we cant handle a 30 second ad...if it means saving $$180 a year?
It's $10 per month, so unless there are 18 months in a year where you are, it's not quite $180, but to answer the question - yes, there are a lot of people who will pay to remove the adverts.
There will still be a free tier on Apple music - the radio station thing they have - but the (self directed/semi-curated) streaming service will be paid. They've clearly looked at it and decided that the free streaming market is already well supplied - Pandora and Spotify in the US, for example, and want to go after the customers who are willing to pay to be ad free.
It's not about having a "short attention span", it's about perceived value. It's clearly worth it to many since both Pandora and Spotify have paid tiers, although clearly they have a lot more free users than paid ones.
I just did 18 months of Pandora for $45, that's a LOT cheaper than the Apple family plan (my wife uses my Pandora account with her own playlists)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Someone on the design team has obviously watched people try to find the pointer.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
who do you think will be paying for your Social security or the majority of the general tax revenues when you retire? People who raise kids create the future at great expense to themselves.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Clippy got a golden parachute and invested in a social media startup.
He currently lives in a Portland duplex.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What are you comparing? pandora is $5 a month so your $45 for 18 month seems like a discount. And for that you don't get arbitrary music playlists, just more skips of some algorithmic genre ordering. There's no comparison to here and it's not much of a savings if you really care about what you are listening too. If not just tune in an internet radio station that plays what you like there's thousands of channels out there so you can find one you like.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
iPhone 5S - Does it have the resources to upgrade to IOS9? Will it run faster or slower? Will the batteries last longer for somebody who mainly does phone calls and texts?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd like Siri to answer Cortana (and vice versa) one day. That'll be a blast!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
XM radio still thinks that people like listening to D.J's blab for 5 minutes between songs also, so yeah...
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
You're wasting your bytes. There's no one more qualified than single, childless people to talk at great length on marriage and child raising. In my experience, they're also chock full of advice. They also enjoy having that pointed out to them. All-in-all, just a fun group to hang with.
I mean when you have FREE services out there why would you spend 15 bucks a month?
Apple is vigorously working, right now, to convince the Big Music Publishers that they should stop allowing ANY free streaming of their music on the Internet.
No, seriously. They're doing that, and working really hard at it.
Certainly not as sexy as the Swift announcements, but has anyone else noticed that the Xcode 7 developer beta release notes state that 7 will add generics to Objective-C? Looks like a major language update.
As another comment said, it's $120/yr not $180/yr. In any case I have a paid Spotify subscription, had one for years. Two reasons:
1) I HATE ADS, I used Spotify free for a little while. If I have to hear another ad for Coca-Cola...
2) I have about 1000 songs in offline playlists, they're downloaded to my iPad, which I use instead of a mobile phone. I can listen to music anywhere, even if there's no connection.
Besides, there are better ways to pinch pennies. My iPad costs me $30/mo.
On the other hand, Spotify likes to reset the "Start at boot" option whenever it updates (I use the Spotify desktop app maybe once every other month), and forces me to have "friends" who can see some amount of information about my usage. There's no way to remove "friends" or block them, so as soon as Apple Music is available I'll probably switch.
However, I'm a bit queasy about switching to a service that in a previous incarnation was targeted at people who listened to hip-hop at skate parks with their "entourage".
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Given I'm likely to die before getting a state pension, given I'm making private pension arrangements so that I don't need a state pension, given I'm going to continue to be taxed way above my usage of the NHS and given I'm also paying to educate other peoples offspring I'm curious that you seem to think I should also subsidise a lifestyle that I can't afford for myself by giving money to people with a joint income, shared costs and two sets of tax thresholds.
I accept that children aren't cheap but that doesn't mean the rest of us should pay for them. Trust me, this country isn't short of people right now, if the birthrate dropped to zero we'd have trouble maintaining population.
Swift for Linux piques my interest...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you don't want friends on Spotify, then disconnect it from your Facebook account, make all your playlists private, and turn on private listening (it now remains enabled even if you close the app), so the stuff you listen to doesn't show up in your profile page.
If your friends manage to find you through Spotify anyway, there's nothing much they'll be able to see.
Just more layers of busy-tech complexity added to life.
E Proelio Veritas.
NFC was cool when only Android had it. And in my opinion, only Android still does. Apple is crippling all the other useful features that NFC enables.
Note that some of this hardware is now 8 YEARS old, and still being supported.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I primarily use Spotify on the iPad, where it says "Private Session lasts until you've been inactive for 6 hours". With my usage habits, that would mean I'd probably have to reset it twice a day. I'd rather not waste 30 seconds every time I open Spotify to check if it's forgotten yet.
Oh, and it's not connected to Facebook, and my playlists are private, but I'm not actually sure what's visible to other Spotify users. I'd just prefer that "none" was an option. I forgot to mention another annoyance with Spotify, occasionally an update will re-enable the "friends" bar. I'm so sick of getting nagged to let social media invade my screen. GMail's Google Plus, Netflix's Facebook integration, Digg Deeper, and Spotify. All of them are (or were) set up to nag you until you enable their social functionality.
For a while Spotify would randomly pop up a message to enable some Facebook trash on the iOS app, I think they were actually hoping you'd hit it by accident. Even after multiple refusals it would keep coming back.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Apple's missed opportunity.
1) Swift open source is kind of big. 2) Re Apple Watch 'complications', complications is the traditional term for the inner working of a pocket watch.
Anyway it's more expensive than either Netflix or Crunchyroll, so I'll pass.
Probably the cheapest they could negotiate with the "record" labels, who seem to have conveniently forgotten the role that broadcast played in their popularity, back when the LABEL payed the BROADCASTER, not the other way around...
moving the goalposts???
No, simply trying to compare on equal terms. You can go ad-supported, or you can go subscriber-supported, or you can be ridiculously greedy like the cable companies, and suck down on both; but that's an entirely different thread...
There will still be a free tier on Apple music - the radio station thing they have - but the (self directed/semi-curated) streaming service will be paid. They've clearly looked at it and decided that the free streaming market is already well supplied - Pandora and Spotify in the US, for example, and want to go after the customers who are willing to pay to be ad free.
And it isn't like Apple doesn't know about services like Pandora. Remember a few years ago, when basically no one was allowed to develop iOS Apps that ran in the background? Remember who else besides Apple was granted special permission to run in the background on iOS? Pandora.
What are you comparing? pandora is $5 a month so your $45 for 18 month seems like a discount. And for that you don't get arbitrary music playlists, just more skips of some algorithmic genre ordering. There's no comparison to here and it's not much of a savings if you really care about what you are listening too. If not just tune in an internet radio station that plays what you like there's thousands of channels out there so you can find one you like.
Not to mention the fact that Spotify and Pandora, et al, no DOUBT sell your musical tastes into slavery; which it is pretty clear that Apple has no interest in doing. That alone is worth some real $$$.
moving the goalposts???
He asked for equivalents for an add-free service. You replied with add-riddled ones. Who again moved the goal posts?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I'll get right on it!
Oh wait... no... I am not an Apple developer. Right. Sorry.
Perhaps you should post these suggestions where an Apple dev might actually see them?
pretty amazing. the yearly updates make me feel like I'm getting a new device each year.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Tech More: Streaming Spotify Jimmy Iovine Apple
Why Apple wants to end the era of free music streaming
The link didn't work in above for some reason.
Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch
Why Apple wants to end the era of free music streaming
The link didn't work in above for some reason. Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch Why Apple wants to end the era of free music streaming
Oddly enough, there's not a single music publisher who says they have even been contacted by Apple concerning that issue -so either Apple has every single publisher in their pocket already - or the clowns at BusinessInsider are again blowing their coke the wrong way.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I've got to say, it's great for once to see a spammer work himself into a puddle. When you (for instance) mark an e-mail as spam you just don't get this kind of satisfaction.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.