As promised I tuned into Apples Word Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote this morning. And, as expected, Steve and company talked about OS X Lion (10.7), iOS 5, and iCloud. And, no, there wasn’t a “just one more thing” (per se). All of the new features look fantastic, but unless you’re a developer, we’re not going to see the best stuff until at least July. This post is going to talk about the three key parts of the keynote in general followed by deeper posts on each of the parts on their own.
If you want to watch the entire keynote (I know I’ll be watching before I complete all the posts) you can watch the WWDC keynote here on Apple’s events area. The event clocks in at about 2 hours, so make some popcorn for this feature-length keynote.
Let’s start with the top-line stuff…
OS X Lion (10.7)
I know you want to know when we can get it and how much, so I’ll answer that first: It will be available (on schedule) in July for ~$30. Yeah, just $30. Oh and you won’t find Lion on the shelf at the Apple or any other store. It’s going to be available only through the Mac App Store. And before you think … ouch that’s going to hurt … it’s only 4 GB. Yeah 4. Apple is finally updating the Mac App store (and iOS…) to download updates as delta changes only. So, you’re not downloading all of 10.7, just what’s new. What wasn’t said in the keynote is how (or if) we’ll be able to make Lion boot-reinstall DVDs. Turns out OS X is going to create a special recovery partition on your machine for exactly this purpose (via Gizmodo)
Features: Mission control .. Think Exposé + Spaces, but actually useful this time (Spaces, not Exposé, I use that all the time)
App Store: update apps with delta changes only. So, faster, easter, smaller updates.
Launch Pad … Think iOS writ large
Multitouch … Maybe a reason for people to pickup Magic trackpads (if you don’t use a MacBook)
Full screen apps … Bigger is better. Turn on and off with swipes
Autosave … No more … quit and not saving or just app crashing and losing stuff.
Versions … yeah if you autosave you have to be able to go back in time and fix stuff. Done.
Air Drop … Have friends on the same network, just drop the files to them. Yeah, there are some security questions here. But, there will be encrypted transfers and approve/accept
Mail … One of the most beleaguered default apps gets a make-over. Watch out Sparrow!
iOS 5
Looks like this will be a free update, if you have an iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPhone 4 or better. When? Fall. Which is a bummer because there are going to be over 200 new features. Apple highlighted a few:
Highlighted features:
Notifications that aren’t annoying.
Safari with Readabilty and Tabs. Nice
Twitter baked into the OS. Set up sign in in Settings and all apps can use it
Camera … finally take a picture without unlocking the phone. Shutter with volume up, built-in editing tools. Sorry Camera+
Reminders … yeah time sensitive and location sensitive reminders. There are a few apps that are going to die now.
Newsstand … like iBooks, but for magazines. Nice.
Game Center … nice enhancements, profile pictures, buying games within GC, game recommendations. iMessage … BBM meets iOS. Yeah, RIM, your lunch has been eaten. And Apple is eyeing your dinner.
Mail getting another update. Better enterprise connections. Oh poor BlackBerry
PC Free updates … like Lion, iOS 5 will update with only the deltas so everything will be faster … so we can update without connecting to a machine! Even better, you don’t need a computer at all to set up an iOS device!
iCloud
Most of the good stuff won’t be available until iOS 5 is out. You can see your purchase history for apps right now to redownload apps on your devices, but I haven’t seen iTunes history yet for songs. I don’t think iCloud will do everything we thought it might. Yes, awesome stuff like song syncing, picture syncing, document syncing (iWork out of the box), contact syncing, and mail syncing is there. A whole iCloud API is being released and this isn’t going to be Mac only, either.
Features:
Photo syncing with Photostream
Document syncing with iWork
iOS backups (automatic)
Contacts Mail App syncin
iTunes syncing for songs
iBooks syncing For $25/yr you can use iTunes match to sync songs from CDs you’ve ripped. Yeah, Apple just figured out how to make money off of all the music your pirated.
As I said in the beginning, I’m going to delve deeper into all of these announcements in posts of their own. So if you have questions … hold on. I might answer them shortly!
