BackApple WWDC: Incremental updates, no new devices this year
Focus on the next versions of Mac OS X, iOS and Music
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Apple’s annual World Wide Developers’ Conference, over the years, has either been about ground-breaking new products or about updating existing products. The WWDC 2015 event in San Francisco yesterday was more of the latter. We look at the important announcements.
iOS 8.4
Let us first talk about an upcoming update to the current iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 8. The next update, labelled iOS 8.4, will be available for download from 30 June. After a lot of criticism for the previous two iterations, iOS 8.2 and iOS 8.3, Apple has said that there will be “under-the-hood" improvements with 8.4, which should hopefully solve issues of sluggish performance, poor battery life and app compatibility issues.
Also, iOS 8.4 will introduce the Apple Music service, which we will describe in detail a bit later.
iOS 9
The next version of the iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 9, will be available for download by September. No dates have been given yet.
Multi-tasking is another big addition, which will allow users to run two apps at the same time, side by side. The feature is called Split View, and will be extremely useful for iPad users. However, this feature will work only with the latest iPad Air 2. Possibly because of hardware and processing power limitations, it will not be available for the older iPad variants. At the moment, there’s no word on whether Split View will be available on the iPhone, particularly the big-screen iPhone 6 Plus.
Another exclusive feature for iPads is that tapping with two fingers on the on-screen keyboard will turn it into a touchpad. This can be useful in cases such as when you want to select a text and drag it in a document.
iOS 9 will be more proactive too. It will consider factors such as the time of day, user location and predict, for example, what app the user might want to launch. If users plug in their headphones, iOS 9 will suggest some recent music they listened to on that device.
Apple’s own Notes and Maps apps will be improved on performance and usability fronts. Much like Flipboard, a new News app will provide personalized news content. The app will first roll out in the US, the UK and Australia. There’s no word yet on its availability in India.
The final big change with iOS 9 will be the size of installation. While iOS 8 used up 4.48GB of internal space on the device, iOS 9 will need just 1.3GB—if you are using a 16GB iPhone, this is great news.
OS X 10.11: El Capitan
Apart from the usual performance enhancements that you would expect from a new operating system, El Capitan will have some new features, and improvements on existing ones. Users can split the screen space equally and use two apps at the same time—Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 also offers this feature. The system font style is also being changed to make reading more comfortable. The Mission Control feature is being redesigned so that multiple windows are easily identifiable. The Safari web browser will also add a speaker icon on the URL bar to mute music coming from any tab. Spotlight search will get more contextual too—instead of just searching by file names, it allows use of more generic search terms such as “files edited last week". OS X 10.11 will also see improvements in graphics, which will help speed up gaming performance and quicken the app launch time by 1.4 times, as compared with Yosemite.
El Capitan is now available for developers. While no official release date has been mentioned yet, Apple says that consumers will be able to download the new OS on their Macs this September.
Apple Music
There is a new feature called “For You" through which Apple Music will ask about the user’s preferences to source songs, artists and playlists.
Apple Music will be launched on 30 June, with iOS 8.4, and will cost $9.99 per month after a three-month free preview. A family plan will also be available, allowing up to six family members to access the features for $14.99 per month.
The big news, however, is that Apple is launching an Android app as well, which too will be available in September.
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