Thankfully, I made it into the building for this year’s keynote address at WWDC (The world wide Apple developer conference). My wishes around iCloud for apps was answered (a developer API like DropBox), there are some cool new user features that my wife and I can really use (shared calenders, reminder lists).
Here are the highlights
OSX Lion
Developers are getting a preview of the next version of the Mac operation system. There are a few really cool new features but really as usual when it comes to Mac OSX updates you will need to use them yourself to fully appreciate them.
Top 10 OSX Lion Features From WWDC 2011 Keynote
Multi-touch Gestures
- know you can use the track pad even more to navigate through menus and such. This is part of the overall trend that Apple seems to be following in terms of making UI more natural.
Full Screen Apps
- this feature is built for laptops with small screens – it is basically a way to put something into focus quickly.
Mission Control
- this is a very elegent solution to navigating through the tons of open screens and processes working on your Mac at any given time. This also solves the number one problem my students who come from a windows only background have on the Mac (the numerous windows and ways of dealing with them). They did a really good job on this and it feels well thought out.
Mac App Store
- this was actually launched in January, the only news is that it will ship automatically with the new version of OSX. But, they did have some very compelling stats on sales on the app store which is leading me to think that it’s time to port my iOS apps to the Mac.
Launch Pad
- this makes the Mac desktop more iOS-like in terms of organization. This is great for me as a user as I find it difficult to locate apps on the Mac all the time.
Resume
- OSX will now save the state of all your apps automatically so that we you run them again the future the app remembers everything about where you are in a document, your content and your settings.
Autosave
- you no longer need to worry about ctrl-S to save your work all the time. Apps will now do this automatically. We’ll see how veteran users react to this paradigm shift in their workflow.
Versions
- OSX apps will now keep a record of all the changes in your apps. This is essentially uinversal version control for developers and normal people too. Now this is exciting and solves tons of problems that I remember from my day job.
Air Drop
- this is kinda like “Bump” but for Macs and works much the same way. You can basically share documents with your friends on the same wifi network practically automatically. It replaces sneakernet (which we all still use).
I was suprised that they ended with this one, but that may be because I decided long ago to use gmail in the cloud for all my mail. They basically are making Mac Mail more like the iPad version of Mail. It is certainly an improvement but probably not enough for me personally to switch.
iOS 5
We got the usual fanfare about iOS here, amazing stats like 200 million iOS devices, 425,000 apps, 90,000 iPad only apps, 14 billion apps downloaded in three years and 2.5 billion dollars paid out to developers. Clearly, the platform is a success with 5,200 developers willing to pay $1500 + travel expenses just to attend this event. Here are the highlights:
Notification Center
- they are cleaning up the process of sending notifications. This is a lot of well done usuability and UI stuff and users are going to like this I think.
News Stand
- they will have a special area for subscriptions to things like newspapers and maganizes. This looks promising for app developers who want to be more information sellers (like me – possibility).
- Apple is not buying Twitter as was rumored but they seem to be working closing with them. Twitter is getting integrated into all the native apps. They are also making it is so users only need to enter in their Twitter credentials in once (instead of for each app).
Makes you wonder still if there is not a deal in the works – because what about Facebook? Twitter is certainly popular among the geek set but Facebook is where most people are making personal connections which is what mobile and iOS are all about.
Safari
- the open source browser used on iPhone, iPad and Android is getting some more features. It seems to be all the features present in the popular app “Instapaper” (one of my favorites). What Instapaper and now Safari do is take all the meaningful content out of a website and present it without the distractions (basically adds). Then it presents everything in the right font for mobile. You can also mark stories to be “Read Later”.
Reminders App
- First they took Instapaper, then they took Toodledo (and Things and OmniFocus). Apple is now giving us a native task manager. It looks nice, well thought out and simple. It also puts tons of pressure on established apps out there (always a risk in this business for us small developers).
Camera
- they are investing a lot into the camera by making it faster and easier to use. The best thing is that you can snap pictures much more quickly (this is a big problem for me with a cute toddler running around our house).
- They have made some improvements to the mail app (meh)
Game Center
- They have made some improvements to Game Center (meh). I guess I just don’t get Game Center even if games seem so popular on iOS.
iMessage
- this is pretty cool, Apple is giving “texting” to iPad and iPod Touch owners over wifi. Your texts will all be synced as well which is a nice touch (you can start a conversation on the iPhone and continue it on the iPad).
iCloud
This topic is going to get it’s own post – probably tommorrow. But, here are my initial thoughts. This is what we need – essentially, you will be able to keep your iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac & PC apps and content in sync. The “true copy” will live in the “Cloud” which means a remote data center.
Developers will get their API so your apps will start to save data in the cloud, but even without that your apps will now be backed up in the cloud. Sometime else that is nice is that apps can edit documents in the cloud and the changes will be pushed to all other devices and apps that use the document.
So, for example I may have a tasting notes app that works on a note in the cloud. When you are at home you may use a windows desktop app to edit the note but while on the road you might edit the note with my tasting notes app. All your apps and devices will see the changes immediately.
In a nutshell, Apple is demoting the Mac and PC as the place where your “true copy” of your digital life is stored and promoting the Cloud to be the place where your “true copy” of data is stored.
What implications does iCloud hold for developers?
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