Steve Jobs and his crew are on stage for the WWDC keynote in California. They are announcing more information on OSX Lion plus introducing iOS5 and the the iCloud ecosystem. Read on for our cheat sheet with all the new feature details you need at a glance.
OSX Lion
- 250 New Features
- New Touch Gestures
- Expose and Spaces now unified as new 'Mission Control' feature
- Full Screen Apps – swipe with 3 fingers to return to desktop
- Face Tracking in PhotoBooth
- Mac App Store Built in
- A 4-finger pinch evokes 'Launchpad' to show icons for your apps on the desktop (think iOS Springboard for OSX)
- 'Resume' – Saves the state of the app a la iOS
- 'Versions' – Saving all the versions of the doc you're working on automatically (think time machine fordocs)
- 'AirDrop' – peer to peer file sharing utility, no setup, confirmation, encrypted
- New Mail.app version – similar to the iOS mail ui
- OSX Lion will ONLY be available from the Mac App Store
- for $29 (for 5 devices!!)
- OSX Lion Available July
iOS 5
- Devs get more than 1500 APIs and tools
- Users get more than 200 new features
- Notifications redesigned (hurrah!) in new 'Notifications Center' (swipe down) a la Android
- Improved Lock Screen – Swipe to unlock on a particular notification to go direct to that app
- Animated Widgets in Notifications system too
- Newsstand – Direct line to Magazines and Newspapers (automatic background downloads)
- Twitter – Integrated into many apps (eg Camera, plus use Twitter to automatically update the photos in your contact list)
- Reeder – Reformats web pages to make them easier to read
- Reading List – Built in Read It Later (syncs across devices)
- Safari gains Tabs
- Reminders -Tasks on iOS, will sync with CalDav / Outlook
- Camera – Faster & launch with a double click of home button – use volume up button to take a pic
- Photo editing built in
- Rich text formatting in Mail
- Moveable split thumb keyboard
- PC Free – Wireless syncing – no more need to connect to a Mac or PC to 'activate'
- Software Updates over the air
- Delta software updates – no huge download required each time, only download the changes
- Game Center Updates
- iMessage – New Messaging Service for all iOS device, send text, photos, videos, contacts. 3G and Wi-Fi supported, encrypted
- Wi-Fi sync to iTunes !!! (including backing the device up wirelessly)
- Dev release today
- iOS 5 available to users 'This Fall'
iCloud
- The PC / Mac no longer the hub of the digital home
- 'Keeping our devices in sync is driving us crazy'
- 'We're moving your digital life into the Cloud'
- Announcing iCloud – stores your content in the cloud and automatically pushes it to your devices
- Syncing Contacts, Calendar and Mail for all your devices (a la Google)
- Moves from $99 (MobileMe) subscription, to a Free service
- Automatic Daily Backup over Wi-Fi of 'purchased' Music, books, apps, camera roll, device settings, and app data
- Documents in the Cloud – Supported by iWork apps (Pages, Number & Keynote)
- iCloud Storage APIs – Devs can tie into iCloud (supports Macs & PCs too)
- Photos from your iOS devices viewable from Apple TV, all automatically
- iTunes in the Cloud – Buy a song on any device – download and listen to it on all your devices
- All free free free
- Includes 5GB of space for users
- iTunes parts available now – rest comes with iOS 5 in 'The Fall'
- $24.99 per year to hold your music library – scans your collection, only needs to upload songs not in their 18million song librabry
What do you think? Lets us know in the comments below.
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Looks like Apple are playing catch-up with Microsoft for a change.
And we obviously trust Apple will keep all this data secure and not abuse it?????!!!!!!
Amazing how Apple protest that everyone else is copying their ‘cool’ ideas. Then they ‘borrow’ notifications from Android and Tabs from Mozilla(?), wireless syncing from everyone else, partial updates from everyone else, etc, etc…
I also wonder how much, say, 2TB of cloud costs a year? Amd just how backed up it’ll be? And if anyone will able to look at it apart from me…
It’s not that, it’s that Apple actually lies when they say that they are innovative or revolutionary, since other companies have actually done this with better integration before. The example is iOS 5’s blantant rip-offs of WP7 and Android. It’s just plain wrong to claim something as your innovation when you shamelessly copy from someone else. It’s even worse when people say that companies like Microsoft and Google are copiers of Apple because of what Apple says, when it’s really been the other way around in the past four years. That’s why so many people have a problem with Apple spewing this false crap.
Apple iCloud is a very good launch and it is full of a lot of attractive features. It magically appears on all the Apple devices and it won’t ever need to plug iPhone into the computer to get the pictures on it. It allows all the music to be available all the time and it will be upgraded instantly and everywhere. It allows picking up any task from right where it was left earlier. It also allow all the setting to be set automatically.