If you were waiting with baited breath to watch a video of Jony Ive talking about the efforts and the technology that’s gone into building the iPhone 6 from the “ground up”, then you’re in for a disappointment. As expected, Apple made no hardware announcements at WWDC14.
The Keynote address featured a host of upgrades to existing Apple products, all software, mind you – but, oh, what a delight they are. Let’s recap.
OSX Yosemite
Keeping up with the new tradition of naming their OS after beautiful locations in California (yes, that’s what Mavericks is), Apple decided to name the new OS 10.10 after the famed National Park – behold OSX Yosemite (pronounced Yo-Sim-It-Tee, before you embarrass yourself).
Apple has carried forward the beautiful flat design it launched with iOS 7 into the new desktop OS and it’s safe to say that the transition is seamless. Yosemite also features the new Dark Mode, which turns the menu into a translucent dark color creating less distraction for content in the center of the screen.
The translucency is visible in both the Dark and Normal modes, and affects the menus as well as the Finder and the Dock – Apple SVP Craig Federighi kept pointing out during demos how the translucency enhanced the experience. We loved it!
The Notifications Center also includes a Today view, much like its iOS counterpart. Developers will also be able to provide Notification Center widgets as part of their OS X apps.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the new OS is something called Continuity – a seamless sync of all Apple devices that allow for you to pick up where you left off from one device to another. Additionally, you can use this feature to also make calls using your Macbook, by connecting to your iPhone’s hotspot – a feature Federighi cheekily demoed by calling up “new employee” Dr. Dre.
The new Spotlight Search now pops up a large search bar in the center of the screen when prompted, and shows live results across Bing, Maps, Wikipedia, etc. We haven’t tested it out yet, but we reckon it’s using a WolfgramAlpha back-end similar to the one used for Siri.
iCloud Drive
If you recently received a notification telling you that your 35GB free, 2-year-long trial period on Dropbox is about to expire and that you should pay for the upgrade now – we suggest you wait it out a bit. We’re not quite ready to blindly back Apple’s iCloud Drive just yet, but with a cloud-based storage system that works from within the Finder, as well as documents sync across Apple devices and Windows-based PCs, we think it might be worth the wait, just to watch what it can do. Every user will get 5GB for free, followed by $0.99 for 20GB and $3.99 for 200GB per month.
iOS 8
While OSX Yosemite is more a form update, iOS 8 in contrast is a true functional upgrade. Interactive Notifications allow users to reply to Messages right from the notification center, while your background continues to run.
With new iCloud photo storage, users can access all of their photos across all devices using iCloud Drive, plus it comes with improved photo editing features that allow more control over what aspect of an image you want to change.
The new TouchID opens up fingerprint authentication to third-party apps, without having to pass your biometric data to developers. A step up, definitely; and a much needed feature extension.
Inspired (or borrowed?) somewhat by SwiftKey, the new QuickType feature on the iOS keyboard allows for predictive typing that gauges your conversation tonality and provides suggestions suitable to the context of what you’re typing. To be perfectly honest, we’d like to test drive this particular feature before raising our thumbs!
Some of the other features on iOS 8 include HealthKit, which is to be a one-stop destination for all of a user’s health data that can be collected from third-party applications. Also in line is a Siri upgrade that features a “Hey Siri” hotword to wake Siri up (Ok Google much?), but more interestingly also adds support for Shazam song recognition and link to direct iTunes purchase, right from within Siri results. They’ve also added new enterprise-focused features to iOS, including expanded data protection, VIP threads, and third-party document sharing.
Developers’ Delight
As the name suggests, it is a developers’ conference after all, so Apple made sure it didn’t leave them high and dry during the keynote. The first bit of good news is that TestFlight will be available to developers, allowing them to beta-test their apps to select candidates and get live feedback. Also, a new developer framework called CloudKit will become available, allowing developers to build cloud-connected apps. As Federighi pointed out, it will be free… with limits.
Game developers will probably have a field day with Metal, Apple’s new 3D API which takes advantage of Apple’s A7 Processor to create interactive 3D graphics, and will allow games to get 10 times faster draw rates.
As is customary, Apple left their most applause-inducing and whistle-inviting announcement to the very end. They’re taking the C out of Objective C, so to speak. They’ve announced their own programming language, Swift, which, according to the graphs shown, is way faster than the aforementioned, but still manages to work alongside it, and will also function perfectly well with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
The Apple Fanboys have a long, hot summer to endure before any of these features and upgrades reach their devices, since they’ll be out in Fall 2014. Unless they’ve got developer accounts. In which case, they can at least test drive Yosemite Beta. Now: https://appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
You can also check out the entire WWDC 2014 Keynote here.
