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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.
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.
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.
Don't worry, I just wasted time reading your comment, so we're even.
-- Tim Cook.
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
Swift 2 CAN make apps for Linux. Apple's releasing the compiler and the standard libraries for Linux.
And as its open source, someone can do the same for Windows. Given Microsoft's recent moves I wouldn't be surprised it Microsoft themselves port it.
This is the big news for Slashdotters from this years WWDC.
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
I thought they made a really compelling argument for Apple Radio. They are pushing on the idea of a distinction between radio and algorithmically-driven playlists. Of the role of a djay in curating music and placing it in a cultural context. On the very notion of pop music not as a pejorative term but as a dimension of our shared experience.
Ok sure, I'll bite, at least for the trial period. $10/mo sounds expensive, tho.
$10/mo is cheap compared to SiriusXM. SiriusXM is a terrible company, their customer service is awful and their marketing machine makes the people selling fake viagra blush. Advertisements on some channels (Comedy in particular) are some of the sleaziest late-night ads I have ever heard. But I have struggled to find something better. The barrier to entry into online services is a bit high- every online service there is requires some tweaking, customizing, or "learning your tastes" period, whereas I can just turn on Sirius and go to a genre channel and get exactly what the channel says it is.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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
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)
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.
Imagine that, a phone introduced in September 2011, still getting updates....
here's a refinement: they finally fixed the shift key in ios9. by default, all the keyboard letters are lower case. when the shift key is engaged, all the keyboard letters are upper case. makes sense! this was sorely needed.
My fear is that they keep adding complexity of different offscreen features and gestures. A big point for ios was that it didn't come with a user's manual because it was so simple and intuitive you didn't need one, but I feel like we're a stone's throw away from the dummy's guide for ios.
Will the batteries last longer for somebody who mainly does phone calls and texts?
... Why do you own an iPhone.
I'd really like Apple to put Swift and Metal out there as open source - it will only increase the adoption rate. But past performance leads me to doubt...
What, do you mean like with WebKit or CUPS?
Sorry, but past performance shows you are wrong. FWIW, Apple never promised to make FaceTime Open Source; what they said was that they were going to openly publish the protocol. I'm rather cheesed that never happened as well, but they never promised to open their source code to FaceTime.
On the other hand, Webkit is a huge OSS project, which is used by a variety of products and companies, and which has a lot of non-Apple/non-Webkit contributors. Indeed, if not for WebKit, there wouldn't be Google Chrome. CUPS is, of course, the print subsystem used by virtually every Linux distro.
Those are the projects you need to judge Apple's OSS track record on.
Yaz