Thousands of people thronged the Moscone West center in San Francisco, California on June 2 to witness yet another show of innovation and capacity from the folks at Apple. The very popular Worldwide Developers Conference was that time when Apple tells the public what its been doing in terms of development over the past year and further to set the trend for apps (mobile and desktop), app developers, techies and the like. Here are a few of the landmark apps and updates.
OS X 10.10 Yosemite
Apple finally unveiled its updated version of its desktop operating system Mac OS X 10.10, now officially known as Yosemite. Many of its users predicted few design updates of the interface from last year’s Mavericks update. The new name of the updated operating system is Yosemite and as always done by apple the OS comes with a picture of the Yosemite National Park as its wallpaper. Before revealing the name Craig mentioned other names the team considered, including alternative California locations like Oxnard, Rancho Cucamonga and Weed.
Design Interface
Though Yosemite doest not boast of a complete overhaul as Mountain Lion, it has been radically enhanced graphically in many ways with a lot of focus on translucency that affects everything in a window, the dock has also been completely redesigned with two dimensional icons in line with the predictions that the new operating system would feature a cleaner look. The Notification Center now has a Day View, which can be extended by using widgets from the App Store. Now users can execute a number of functions from one place on the Mac. The change will also likely fuel existing speculation that Apple is gradually moving to merge iOS and OS X into one seamless experience in the future.
Spotlight Search Enhancement & Safari
Spotlight now gives you a search bar right in the middle of the screen moving from its previous home at the top right corner, making it look very much like a clean, web-based search engine right on your desktop. The updated Spotlight also offers Spotlight Suggestions, which offers auto-complete guesses at what you might be searching for, including things restaurants and locations. The update also included a redesign of Safari, which offers a slimmer menu bar, giving the user more space to surf the web. Part of the way that slimmer look was accomplished was by removing the favorites bar, instead bringing your favorites up in the address bar when you type them in. There’s also an RSS subscription option embedded in the new browser, making it clear that RSS feeds are alive and well, at least as far as Apple is concerned.
Apple Calls Directly From Your Mac
One of the cool things Craig Demoed was receiving non-iMessage texts on your Mac as well as make calls directly from your Mac using your iPhone (with the Mac essentially acting as a speaker phone). Craig demonstrated the feature by calling new Apple hire Dr. Dre. The call, including a waveform graphic, appeared in a translucent box on the Mac desktop. The update will be available to developers today and to the general public in the fall as a free update. There is also a public beta program that will allow anyone to try the new operating system out without being a developer.
Cloud storage platforms
Apple announced iCloud Drive, a cloud-based file management system that will be available on iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, which will also work with third party apps and will run on Windows 8. Files stored in iCloud Drive can be viewed across devices and edits are automatically synced to the cloud so you can easily pick up where you left off. 20 GB will cost $0.99 a month while 200 GB will be $3.99.
Photo editors
Apple’s new Photos app, includes an array of new smart editing tools. While you can still control things like levels, brightness and contrast independently, the new features allow you to adjust all of these at once to the optimum level with just one swipe. All changes made within Photos will be synced with iCloud so the edited images will be available in real time across all of your devices.
Revamped App Store
Apple introduced a number of improvements to the iOS App Store that developers have been asking for. Developers will be able to offer multiple apps under a single bundle price. They’ll also be able to post videos on their app’s description page, letting them describe and demonstrate how an app works to potential buyers. Apple is also allowing developers to offer their app as a public beta download through TestFlight. That means users will be able to try out early versions of apps before their official release, and developers will be able to get ahead of bugs sooner in the process.
In Conclusion,
Generally, Apple showed seniority in the apps game and could largely be due to its large user base that Tim Cook boasted of in his Keynote address. Tim spoke of the 98% of iOS and Mac OS X adopters who were satisfied with the software and the billions of new subscribers, almost 50% increment from last years figures. Apple did not disappoint in setting the trend for the next 12 months neither did it fail in raising eyebrows and developer shoulders. Actually developers would now love apple for its new and amazing programming language “Swift” which is developer friendly (see your code run while you type), and the numerous API’s that have been announced to connect and trigger many activities on all its apple platforms. Apple also officially announced and launched its iHome initiatives putting to rest the speculations of Apple’s #InternetOfThings interest, with the iHome connecting to various hardware systems in your home.
