Apple’s developer conference began this morning, and as usual there was a keynote address with several major announcements. Unlike most of these announcements, everyone already knew the major things they were going to be showing off: Mac OS 10.7 (Lion), iOS 5, and iCloud. No one was expecting new hardware today, and none was announced.
UPDATE: You can watch the whole keynote yourself here.
First up was Lion, the next version of Apple’s desktop operating system OS X. Apple has been putting multi-touch trackpads into all of their laptops for a while now, and even sells a standalone touchpad for other computers, so of course gestures are all over the place in Lion. It functions much like iOS—double tap to zoom into a section, pinch for more precise zooming, swiping apps hither and yon, etc. They also demoed full screen apps and “Mission Control”, which is a revamped version of Dashboard, Spaces, and Exposé. Everything is made to work much more like an iPad if you want to use gestures, but of course you have the option of using normal mouse interactions at any time, too. This is smart and flexible, and reminiscent of the recent demo of Windows 8.
Another very iOS-like feature is Launchpad. Using this system, desktop apps can resume right where they left off, just like on iOS, and Lion also adds the ability for apps to auto-save your documents, saving only the changes between document versions. Yes, that means you can be working in a word processor and just close the app, and when you re-open it, your document will be just how you left it. This is bringing version-control to the masses, and it’s fucking brilliant and long overdue. Having this kind of granular control of versions of your everyday documents, saved in real time, is exactly the kind of thing next-generation operating systems should be doing. Apple is aggressively trying to reduce the learning curve for using a computer—they don’t want you to worry about how to discover and install apps, where things are on the file system (or even what a file system is), losing your work, etc. You can get under the hood if you want to, but most people don’t want to.
Lion will also bring a long-awaited major update to Apple’s Mail application, which promises better search, smarter filter rules, and generally to make our lead developer Jay’s life 423% happier.
The Lion upgrade will be installed this directly from the Mac App Store. No discs, no reboot, just buy it and it installs. Wild. It will be $30 and available in July. Again, making operating system upgrades a (roughly) single-click affair for $30? Very smart.
Details on the next version of iOS and the mysterious iCloud after the jump.
Second up was a preview of the next version of the iPhone/iPad/iPod system, iOS 5.
The first new feature is a reworking of the HORRIBLE I KILL YOU iOS notification system. Thank God. Alerts and messages are aggregated and accessed by swiping down from the top of the screen, and also shown on the lock screen. This is not new to users of any other mobile OS, of course, but it’s about damn time Apple got this done. The crappy notifications are easily the single most annoying thing about iOS.
The Newsstand app will collect all your content subscriptions in one place, with new issues downloading in the background for offline reading. I’ve been using the New Yorker’s iPad app recently, and getting new issues is definitely the clunkiest part. If I just had the new issue there automatically, I could spend all week meaning to read it much more easily.
Mobile Safari gains the Reader view and a “Reading List” that collects things you would like to read later. These together are pretty much exactly like Instapaper and Readability and such. Publishers will be mad because this makes it very easy to read their web content without looking at the ads. Despite being in the publishing industry myself, I love these apps and use them all the time. Yes, they make it harder to get people to look at the ads, but that’s our problem, not yours. Content producers will constantly be faced with new technology that may disrupt their revenue models (TiVo, the Internet), and they’ll have to adapt or die. This is life.
iOS also adds a new reminders/to-do system that syncs across devices and features “geofences,” meaning you can set a reminder to go off when you enter or exit a certain location. Neat. There are approximately 900,000 reminder and to-do list apps on the App Store already, and I’ve tried most of them. Current favorite: Due. No idea if Apple’s offering will replace it, but the geofences could tip the scales.
Other updates to iOS:
— Twitter is built-in. Enter your account info in the Settings app and post photos to Twitter directly from any app that supports it without separate authentication. Didn’t see a mention of how this might (or might not) deal with multiple Twitter accounts.
— Camera button on the lock screen. Take a photo using the hardware volume button, edit photos in the Photos app, and some other small updates.
— Various small but welcome updates to the Mail app: flagging messages, better search, rich text, built-in dictionary, etc.
— A new split keyboard for the iPad lets you type with your thumbs.
— Some Game Center stuff, but nobody cares about Game Center. Especially if it keeps that horrible basement poker table design. Ugh.
iOS 5 Developer Preview will be out today, and will available to everyone (with at least an iPhone 3GS) this fall, and iOS 5 devices will not require iTunes to work out of the box. Open it up and set it up directly, without a computer. iOS software updates will also happen over-the-air.
Finally, iCloud.
As expected, Apple announced a Big New Service to attempt to move all your digital content to their servers (a.k.a., “the cloud”), “demoting” your computer to just another device. iCloud automatically uploads and stores your content, and pushes it to all your devices. iCloud will back up your music, photos, app data, and device settings, so when you get a new device, you log in and get all your settings from your previous one pulled down. iCloud will also sync documents and data from other apps via developer APIs, and any photos you take will automatically be synced with your other devices immediately. iCloud will also sync your calendars, contacts, and mail, replacing Mobile Me, Apple’s $99/year service, which is going away.
The big news, though, “iTunes in the Cloud.” Buy a song on one device and it will be pushed out to up to 10 other devices automatically, for the same price. But what if you didn’t buy your music via iTunes? Then you can use iTunes Match to scan your library for matches with iTunes content. If a match is found, that music is treated the same as if you had purchased it from iTunes, synced across devices, with no uploading. They’ll even upgrade your tunes to 256 kbps AAC. iTunes Match will be $25/year and will launch in the fall with iOS5.
UPDATE: If no match is found, you can upload your music yourself and it will sync to your devices, though those tracks will count against your storage limit while matched tracks will not.
I’m no music-industry expert, but.. wow?
That’s it. I’m impressed with the breadth of Apple’s announcements today. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the way people use desktop computers in some important ways, many of the same ways they changed the way people use mobile phones. iOS 5 isn’t earth-shattering, but looks like a solid improvement to a lot of core features. And iCloud ties everything together and could throw some seriously cold water on Google and Amazon’s recent cloud music announcements.
too long, didnt read.
I suppose anyone that has a real preference would be able to turn the feature off (but I won’t let simple logic stop me from commenting on something I’ve never seen), but the autosave feature, as you describe it, sounds like it’d lead to more frustration—not less. Quitting and restarting applications to start fresh on a failed group of ideas is part of my workflow.
Any idea on issues regarding iTunes Match vs. DRM?
@2 – A version control system doesn’t force you to pick up where you left off, if just allows you. There’s no reason having an incremental backup should stop you from starting from scratch if you want to.
On the iCloud features page, they say “It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes” which would indicate that tracks with other DRM may still work with iTunes Match.
As a longtime Apple desktop user at work I’m looking forward to Lion very much. Thanks for the rundown.
@1. Whats the point of even commenting then? He even gave you a summary at the end so your tiny brain didn’t have to read allll those words.
So if you have weird-ass old hip hop or local EPs anything generally not available on iTunes, it doesn’t work. Shitty.
@6 – No, you can upload that stuff yourself, it’ll just be slower, and subject to the storage limits (5GB free). The stuff that matches doesn’t have to actually sync the file and doesn’t count against your iCloud storage.
I prefer Google’s implementation of the cloud service honestly. I have 7100 songs on my Google Music account. I’m sure that 90% of my music would probably be found, but that 10% that isn’t would really annoy me to not have access to. Google just lets me upload it no matter how obscure. The initial setup is more annoying that the match service I’m sure, but it only took about a day and half to upload all of my music (and I’d guess I’m in the top 1% or so of music library size). After that everything is added in minutes.
Plus, Google streams the music. That means I don’t have to have any music on my device. I get fine performance on both 3G and wifi. And if I’m going somewhere where I won’t have a data connection I can just easily pin the stuff I want to listen to to the phone. I’m also not limited to any number of devices. I can log in anywhere with a web browser.
Even if the Google service doesn’t remain free (and I’m guessing it won’t), I feel it’s worth much more than the iTunes match at the same price, and I imagine it might be a whole lot cheaper. Google storage currently gives you 20GB for $5 a year. My collection is 16GB, so even if they double their current prices (and why would they, storage is getting cheaper); I’d be paying an a lot less than Apple.
@Anthony,
As far as I could tell there was never a good answer of how non matched songs get uploaded and managed. Do you have to do them individually? What about album artwork? I’m sure you can put them on your iCloud, but do they make it easy?
@8, as @7 points out, you can upload anything that doesn’t match.
@9, my guess is it’ll make a playlist of unmatched songs, and then you can choose to upload the playlist. The artwork thing is a good question, but I assume it will transfer as well.
@5
I read them on endgaget. Not really impressed with paying 25$ a year for what dropbox will give you for free without restrictions. Taking a photo and having it be stored on the cloud for 30 days is also a bad idea, because clouds will be hacked, if they dont get your credit card, they’ll get your personal photos. Similar thing happened to MySpace years ago.
Changes to notifications were long coming, but only as a response because others did it better.
The instant camera doesnt impress me unless it has its own button, not a shared volume button.
iMessage just mimicks Black Berry messaging, which really isnt that impressive if your phone can already send mass text send photos, audio or video.
WiFi iTunes syncing, neat, but slower than a USB cable.
Twitter integration, in response to other phone makers doing it better.
OS-X Lion, running out of big cats to name things now. 30$ is cheap, but will it update my wifes older snow leapord?
I think the bigger news is Microsoft has turned its Xbox360 into an IPTV set top box, which anyone with an internet connection, can subscribe to live TV. Common in Europe, but never been done in the USA. Id love to see them stip down the Xbox360 into just a STB with Kinetic/Webcam features.
@boyasunder
I’m not sure they are going to make uploading non matched songs easy. The record labels hate the idea of a cloud drive letting you stream anything you upload. But they seem to be very willing to let people implement the cloud storage that Apple is doing as long as they are getting a cut of the money (I’m curious about how much of that 24.99 is going right back to the record labels). If you had a small collection (2 or 3 GB) you could avoid paying for match altogether and simply upload it manually. Which makes me feel like they may make the manual upload harder than it should be.
The article description made it sound like it had to be matched with iTunes store content. Or rather I decided to skip over words because I am a penis.
>Then you can use iTunes Match to scan your library for matches with iTunes content. If a match is found, that music is treated the same as if you had purchased it from iTunes, synced across devices, with no uploading.
I see now that is for the not-uploading syncing thing. Ho ho ho…
@Kinison
Actually AT&T Uverse is IPTV, and could already be used in that fashion with the xbox 360 (for an additional fee. It will be interesting to see if they sign on to the new integration.
@3 – thanks.
@8 said what I was thinking about iCloud. I have 7100 songs too, by coincidence!
Lion will be excellent. I love Apple for laptops/desktops. I get extremely annoyed with their overpriced iPhones and iPads and snotty commercials. “If you don’t have iTunes on your phone, you don’t have an iPhone.” Fuck you, I stream my entire library for free anywhere thanks to Google!
tl;dr
clouds are way too insecure unless you’re just watching music, film, or stuff like that.
@15
And if you have Comcast for an ISP, you cant use U-Verse. It requires Xbox360s with a hdd and it needs a normal U-Verse set top box somewhere else in the house to work.
@Kinison
If you have U-Verse you probably would be using them as an ISP. And, this new IPTV baked into the XBox would probably work without the other set top box, if AT&T was willing to go that route.
and you still can’t install that OS on a computer you built yourself from parts, so I will continue to use windows….. sigh
@21 – Yes, and I think it’s safe to say it’ll never happen. They’re going in the opposite direction, which makes perfect sense.
@21
Yup and they’ve now gone to using specially modified SATA drives that dont fit normal cables and even if you made a special cable, you still need to get passed the bios, which if you modify, OSX wont install.
Its pretty sad. In order to stay alive, they had to adopt common hardware and re-write their OS to support it. Now that they’re a crazy rich company, they’ll abandon everything and go back to the business model that killed them, which is proprietary hardware.
@23 – Come on. You really think there are enough people in the world who care about those things (or even have any idea what you’re talking about) to make it a bad business model? Do you really think the reason Windows won was because people could build their own computers? From a big business standpoint, roughly nobody cares about this stuff. Hackers and tinkerers will always find ways around these limitations, and that’s fine, but gearing your company to a tiny (and shrinking) group of people has never made any sense.
Any word on the most annoying aspect of iOS mail: Lack of multiple signatures?
@24 “You really think there are enough people in the world who care about those things (or even have any idea what you’re talking about) to make it a bad business model?”
Newegg.com, majority of what they sell are computer components. Ive bought exclusively from them for a decades. 2.9 billion in revenue in 2009 and one of a dozen companies that mostly sell parts. So yeah, I really do think there are enough people in the USA that care about this sort of thing. Clearly Apple doesn’t care, if they did, they wouldn’t be stuck at 10% market share for their desktops.
@26 – Yeah, Apple is clearly hurting from their ignoring of the Newegg masses, what with their 28% year-over-year growth in the PC market, compared to a 1% loss for the rest of the industry. Apple’s PC business has outgrown the rest of the market every quarter for the last 5 years. What are they thinking?!?
Newegg.com has a thriving business, and you like to build computers. Neither of these things has a single thing to do with whether Apple is making a good business decision by not catering to those people (read: you).
You’re right that Apple doesn’t care, but you’re wrong about that hurting their business.