Today Apple opened another Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. As always, the keynote speech was surrounded with hype and predictions of new hardware. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Apple delivered a keynote for developers, disappointing a lot of analysts and members of the general public. And that is good. After all, the conference is for developers. For this audience, the WWDC 2014 keynote was awesome. Here are my comments.
OS X Yosemite
- The new OS X release gets a flatter design, following the steps of iOS 7. That looks very good and elegant, with new icons, style redesigns and new typography. Apple really got it right this time.
- New Today’s View: we already had this on iOS, and now we have it on the Mac, but with a few extras, including 3rd-party widgets. This is the final nail on Dashboard’s coffin.
- Spotlight is much better. It now displays the search bar on the middle of the screen and searches not only local content, but online as well.
- Better apps. You may see them all here.
Safari looks very sleek and has some great improvements, like the new tab management features (scrolling and tab view) and better search, with web snippets support. Safari is getting better and better. When I swap back from Android to iPhone later this year, I’ll definitely drop Chrome for it.
Mail is now usable again, with some great new features, like Mail Drop (large attachments reside on iCloud) and the ability to markup attachments inside the Mail compose window.
Messages now support SMS messages, voice messages and decent group chats, like in WhatsApp. Maybe these will fix the iMessage mess we had so far.
Finder gets iCloud Drive, which I call “The Return of the iDrive”. To be honest, this is how iCloud should had been implemented in the first place. Although the file system is a learning barrier for non-tech people, the lack of access to it made iCloud very useless, as few apps were making good use of all that storage space.
AirDrop now works across iOS and OS X. No more using Dropbox or Google Drive to transfer files between devices. What? Do you still use cables and iTunes?
Photos, a new app for handling photos that relies on iCloud to seamlessly sync all your photos (in full resolution, yay!) across Macs and iOS devices. This kills bloated-as-a-fat-hellspawn iPhoto, for sure. And I won’t be missing it. - iOS integration. This is where the game becomes serious.
Phone Calls. That’s right, you may now take your phone calls on the Mac.
Handoff. The most useful feature announced today, it makes every device aware of what you are doing on the other, so you may resume working on another device from where you left.
Hotspot. You may now activate your Mobile Hotspot on the iPhone from your Mac.
iOS 8
- The new version of iOS is an evolution over iOS 7. Hopefully Apple will fix all the pesky bugs we currently have on iOS 7.
- Better apps. You may see the whole list here.
Photos will be just like the new app for the Mac, described earlier in this post.
In addition to the features announced for OS X Yosemite, Messages on iOS will get a Snapchat-like feature for sending quick short videos, location sharing and the ability to visualize all the attachments of a conversation (like in WhatsApp). - Improvements on some features, like:
Interactive Notifications on Notification Center. You may now take action on your notifications, just like on Android.
Shortcuts to important people on the multitasking interface. Not really cool as People Tiles in Windows Phone 8, but very helpful.
No more being locked in the Compose window on Mail. You may now switch from that to the Inbox view and back. Frankly, who thought a static Compose window was a good idea in the first place? In addition, Mail can now provide smart notifications for adding new contacts or new appointments to the calendar. - iOS finally gets predictive keyboard, like the stock Android or SwiftKey.
- Family Sharing is huge for families wishing to share content. You may even make your kid ask for permission to buy an app on your account.
- iCloud Drive also comes to iOS 8. And this is probably the closest we will get to filesystem access on iOS.
- Health: now all your health-related apps may talk to each other and you may have access to all your health information on a single dashboard.
- Spotlight brings all the intelligence from its Mac counterpart.
- A lot of extra enterprise-friendly features. This consolidates iOS as the best mobile operating system for enterprises.
SDK
The best announcements of today at WWDC 2014 are for developers, though. Those will translate soon into great experiences to users. Here are my favorites:
- iOS is becoming more open. The sandbox data barrier is being lifted just enough so that apps can talk to each other. Bear in mind all apps are still sandboxed. What changes is the fact that an app may ask permission to the OS to access data from another app. This means:
Better sharing, just like we have on Android, for instance. Users will no longer be locked into the preloaded options, which are quite poor today.
Custom actions, in addition to those preloaded in the OS. A good example is real-time translation readily available from the sharing menu.
3rd-party widgets in Today’s View. This is good because Today’s View is available even if the device is locked.
Custom keyboards. Yes, SwiftKey fans, rejoice!
More app options when opening documents. I am not sure at this point if Apple will also let us change the default app, but nevertheless, this is a big step in the right direction. - Touch ID API will allow developers to use the Touch ID sensor. This will work indirectly, by allowing the app to access Keychain data, instead of recording your fingerprint.
- PhotoKit will make editing photos easily, allowing apps to edit the photos directly in Camera Roll, without having to import them first.
- HealthKit API will enable the health-related features mentioned early.
- HomeKit API will allow developers to control smart home devices using Siri. Big news, as this is the first step of Apple into the smart home business.
There are many other new cool features in the SDK, and you may find them here.
WWDC 2014: Wrap-up
Although I don’t see any real innovation in the WWDC 2014 keynote, Apple is moving in the right direction. By opening more iOS, the company will allow a better user experience that is already present in other platforms, such as Android and Windows Phone. The new integration features like Handoff are a big plus. I don’t recall any other ecosystem taking this approach to devices integration. And they are finally fixing iCloud, which was long due.
In addition, things like the HealthKit and HomeKit APIs may pay off in the future if the company manages to attract enough players to these spaces. Health looks like a no-brainer to me, but on the smart home front, things are not very clear.
This year’s keynote might have been a disappointment for many because no new hardware was introduced, but for me it was the best WWDC keynote in years. Made by Apple, for developers. And that is what this conference is all about.
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