What happened at WWDC 2014?
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference - 2nd June
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is a conference held by Apple every year, and is used to announce the latest updates and product info.
This year, Apple held their WWDC on June 2nd and announced some very big changes! So I’m going to give a brief overview of the event.
OS X Yosemite
Apple announced a new version of their Mac OS X, called Yosemite (version 10.10). This new update makes it look and feel more like iOS 7, it has the same flat style, and translucent menu bars. Also, there is now a ‘Dark Mode’ which changes the styling to a black hue.
Spotlight is what Apple call their search bar and they have made some big changes to it this year, it now integrates data from various other sources to improve the speed at which you can find what you are looking for. For example, it will now show you snippets of Wikipedia articles, places on a map and results from the iTunes Store.
Safari has been redesigned to supposedly be faster than all of the other browsers, with changes to the address bar and bookmarks bar.
They also made some small updates to Mail and AirDrop.
Slightly late to the party, Apple announced ‘iCloud Drive’ which, as you would expect is a product similar to Google Drive, Dropbox etc. it will allow you to sync files between OS X, iOS and even Windows! Every user will get 5GB’s for free.
iOS 8
Similarly to OS X Yosemite, the Spotlight search and Mail apps have been updated with the new features.
Apple have made some significant updates to the Notifications, you can now interact with them from the lock screen, and respond to messages without having to leave the app you are in.
Messages got some updates too, adding some Do Not Disturb features similar to WhatsApp and some self-destructing audio and video features similar to Snapchat.
The Photos app now allows you to do some more advanced editing on your photos, this will also be coming to the Mac.
Like Google Now, Siri can now work hands free by saying ‘Hey, Siri’ in the same way you can say ‘OK Google’ on Android. Again, like Android the virtual assistant will be able to recognise music and provide you with information about the song and artist, this will be powered by Shazam.
Yet again, like Android, Apple will now allow you to have widgets in the Notification drop down, install a different Keyboard (SwiftKey, Swype, Fleksy).
They also introduced HealthKit, which can monitor various health stats, and provide relevant parties with this info.
On all of the platforms, they announced ‘Continuity’ which allows you to pick up where you left off, so if you were writing a Pages document on your Mac, your iPhone knows you were doing this and with a swipe on the lock screen will allow you to start editing the document at exactly the same point. One of the more impressive features, is that you can now answer calls, and send text messages right from your Mac!
Finally, for the developers Apple announced a new programming language called Swift. It is designed to coexist with Objective-C for now, but should be significantly faster, and easier to use.
