Apple Steps It Up

The Apple WWDC keynote was held this morning in San Francisco. There was not a single hardware announcement so it may disappointment most; but in my opinion, this has been Apple's most exciting event in years.

OSX Yosemite. As a National Parks lover, this OS better live up to its name (though I wouldn't know since I've yet to go to Yosemite). New look in the interface including the menus, flatter app icons, and the overall feel. Spotlight is now more powerful but the average will probably not notice the difference; I love Spotlight. Supposedly, iCloud support will be improved but I cannot say much about this as I don't use that service yet (Storage is cheap ($.99/month/20GB or $3.99/month/200GB) but not as cheap as Google Drive ($1.99/month/100GB or $9.99/month/1TB) though) . Best of all, it'll be free on release!

iOS 8. Apple really stepped it up with the upcoming iOS; much of it will be catching up with Android. They are finally allow system-wide third-party keyboards! They finally added predictive typing to the default keyboard... Widgets! But only in the notification panel...

The App Store will have many new features. Family Sharing (one account for multiple people), beta-testing, and something new I haven't seen in other platforms, App Bundles for purchase.

Messaging. They are finally going to fix the iMessage issue between iPhone and other non-Apple devices; they somehow got a huge applause... They now will support voice message (like Voxer/WhatsApp) and even allow SnapChat-like disappeaering message. WhatApp's founded even tweeted:

very flattering to see Apple "borrow" numerous WhatsApp features into iMessage in iOS 8 #innovation
— jan koum (@jankoum) June 2, 2014

iOS 8 will have the feature to call up Siri by saying "Hey, Siri!" just like Google's "Ok, Google".

One of the biggest announcements of the day is definitely TouchID. Apple is finally going to allow you to login into other services with TouchID; I don't understand why this wasn't done when TouchID was introduced...

Another big catch-up to Android (and I'm pretty Windows Mobile) has to be the "extensibility" or the interaction between applications. This was the most significant advantage that Android had over iOS and probably the reason I haven't given iOS a long time trial especially someone not fully emerged in the Apple platform. Now that Apple is going to allow applications to interact between various applications; usability will be easier and more accessible. While current iOS users may not think this is a useful feature, they'll will definitely see it's necessity immediately.

The biggest news of all is probably Apple's new language, Swift; it was described as Objective C without the C. This will create an even larger divide between Apple's ecosystem and other platforms. Only time will tell how the adoption numbers for Swift will be. The IDE certainly does look similar to Matlab or Mathematica though.

Overall, really exciting for all Apple fans and users. Apple really made forward movement with their announcement today but not much of it is too innovative. Much of it is taking features from other applications and making it available with the operating system to everyone; this is definitely a good thing.

P.S. Apple, the shots at Google and Microsoft are unnecessary (even if your loyal fans love it).