Wednesday, June 4, 2014

My thoughts on the WWDC 14

On Tuesday morning I woke up early (3am!) to listen to the much anticipated Apple event of the year. Even though there was no mention of hardware updates, there were many features discussed that are really exciting and to look forward to. I am not going to discuss all of them, but highlight some of the ones that are of interest to me.

As anticipated, the new OS X Yosemite was announced. Coming to our macs in the Fall, or Spring in Australia. I love the beautiful flat design, bright colours and the sidebar in which you are able to view notifications and place widgets. A cool feature introduced to mail is the ability to send large documents through maildrop. Up to 5GB to be exact. Apple have also introduced a cloud system similar to dropbox and google drive which will prove handy. I can write a document on my iMac and seamlessly transfer it to my iPad.

Which leads me to the next feature which I am really excited about, continuity between devices. The ability to start writing an email on a computer and finish it on an iPad. Another awesome feature is the ability to answer a call from your iPhone on your computer. I find it annoying if my phone is charging on the other side of the house and usually missing the call. Now I can receive a notification and simply answer the call from my mac. 

The iPhone and iPad platform iOS 8.0 was also announced. Again, some handy features were announced. Previously, we would have to exit an app to answer a message. Not anymore. We are now able to receive notifications and and answer within the app, or swipe the message away for later. Again, there is continuity between devices and the ability to save photos on our icloud to download on the mac later. Another feature that takes my fancy is the new predictive text quicktype which based on previous conversations, will suggest the type of words that we are more likely to use with that particular person.

Although I am not a programmer - I am more than keen to learn Swift. The language looks a little less daunting than Visual Basic. 

I love how the new updates seamlessly bring all devices to work together harmoniously. I am really looking forward to the new OS and iOS!