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Monday 06 June 2011

Video: Full Apple WWDC Keynote [ 06-06-2011 20:43 ]

Author: Serge Novikov Source: Apple Translation by: Paul Smith

Apple have posted up today's keynote WWDC address on the web. Nice and quick that! Head on over to the Apple website to watch it in full!

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Who's Afraid Of Google... Apple? [ 06-06-2011 20:39 ]

Author: Serge Novikov Translation by: Paul Smith

With the iOS 5 announcement today lots of new features were thrown up and looking at Twitter as the keynote progressed there seemed to be two camps emerging over the new features: those who loved them and those who thought they were copies from other platforms.

Both camps could be said to be right. For example, the new notifications system is most definitely a huge improvement over the existing system. Yet the new system bears more than a passing resemblance to Android's notification system, not the least of which is the iconic Android swipe down action to reveal your notifications. Similarly the idea of iMessage is to allow iOS users to message one another using push messages across devices. Does this sound like BlackBerry Messenger? What about Twitter integration? Android has had that for a while now.

The features are most certainly useful of course. Twitter integration to instantly tweet pics from your photo album is of course a great move. Just as being able to communicate across all iOS devices and send pictures and videos is. No one would argue to the contrary with either of those statements. Are they copies though?

Well I personally wouldn't go so far as to say they are out and out copies of those features found on other platforms, after all a good idea is a good idea and others will probably seek to use it. It does show two things though: Apple is not necessarily innovating on its own in these areas and Apple is worried about Google/Android.

Android's notification system is great by most accounts so why shouldn't Apple seek to emulate something that clearly works, and which is popular with many Android users? The question to ask here though is what is Apple bringing to this idea that is uniquely their own? For that we will have to wait and see no doubt. What is clear is that Apple saw Android had a better system than they did and they knew they needed to catch up, but will they only catch up or actually seek to better Android in this area?

iCloud gives us another example of this. It sounds great to say that iCloud allows you to create a document on one device and have it available on another device. Google Documents already allows you to do this though through cloud based storage. Was Apple sufficiently worried by this to feel it had to offer its own version? Regardless Apple's moves in this area show that it is seeking to one up Google here because iCloud, unlike Google's various cloud based services, is a very tightly integrated package by the looks of things. Sure Google Docs is tied into your overall Google account, but iCloud includes the all important music side of things.

All in all the new features announced today are fantastic news for iOS users. Really they are, and I can see why many would be delighted upon reading about them. In releasing these features and basically modelling them on what the competition offers though Apple has perhaps conceded that others are doing things better than they are and that they have lagged behind in some areas. For all their talk of being innovative and industry leading, etc Apple have perhaps showed a little insecurity today...

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Charlie and the Apple Factory [ 06-06-2011 19:49 ]

Author: Serge Novikov Source: College Humour Translation by: Paul Smith

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WWDC: iCloud [ 06-06-2011 19:32 ]

Author: Irina Turina Source: via Engadget Translation by: Paul Smith

iOS 5 grabbed a fair bit of attention at WWDC today, but arguably the most eagerly anticipated announcement today was iCloud. For those of you who don't know iCloud will be replacing MobileMe, which jobs himself today described as not beign Apple's 'finest hour'.

iCloud will act as a data storage mechanism for users, but it goes well beyond that. Your content isn't just stored in the cloud it is also synced across all your iOS devices. For example, a picture taken on your iPhone will be automatically uploaded to iCloud and it is available on your iPad. As ever with Apple the goal seems to be simplicity, it requires no real effort on the part of the user.

The same ethos applies to documents. A document created on your iPad is instantly available across the rest of your devices. The idea isn't really anything new of course, after all Google Documents offers pretty much the same functionality, but taken as part of the overall iCloud package it is a pretty sweet feature.

In terms of storge Apple will be giving users 5 GB to play around with. That's not too shabby at all and should be more than enough for most people. Of course there are bound to be some power users who just don't find it enough.

Now for the big hitter... music. This was definitely the meat of the dish that everyone had been waiting for. iTunes is going to the cloud folks! This includes purchased music being made available to all your devices, so buying a song on your iPhone will make it available on your iPad.

The other iTunes feature to get wrapped up with here is iTunes Match. This scans your own personal library of music and gives it the same status as tracks purchased from iTunes. In other words it treats them as paid for songs. Italso upgrades those tracks to 256kbps versions free of charge. Well I say free ... but the iTunes Match service itself is going to cost you a cool $24.99per year to use. Not bank breaking stuff really. Oh and in case you wondered iTunes Match will upload your tracks that can't be matched against iTunes own database.

So what is all of this going to cost you? Nothing. Yes iCloud is free of charge (except for iTunes Match). You can expect to get your hand son it when iOS 5 launches in the autumn although a beta version is available right now in the U.S.

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WWDC: iOS 5 Announced [ 06-06-2011 19:21 ]

Author: Irina Turina Source: via Engadget Translation by: Paul Smith

Well ... it's been quite the day on the Apple front with lots of new stuff being announced and plenty to chew over. Let's get straight into it and take a look at the iOS 5 announcement first.

There are plenty of new features coming with iOS 5 and Apple showed off 10 of them today so let's see what we have ...

Notifications

This is a hot topic amongst iOS users given the fankly poor state of notifications over the past years. Well today that looks to have been fixed. Apple took the wraps off a brand new notification system that should go a long way to being less disruptive and more a lot more useful.

The new system revolves around something called the 'Notification Centre', which acts as a central hub collating all sorts of different notifications from texts to tweets to Facebook messages. When you receive such an update you get a notification at the top of the screen letting you know, but that notification doesn't hang around, it eventually disappears. To access that notification and action it, along with any others you may have you just swipe down from the top of the screen and up pops a list of your current notifications.

If all this sounds remarkably Androidesque that's because it is, but I'll cover that in a bit more depth in a later post.

Newsstand

Another new feature with iOS 5 is Newsstand, which basically collects together your magazine and newspaper subscriptions in one place. Handy stuff.

Twitter

iOS 5 will ship with inbuilt Twitter integration. There will be a single sign-in through the settings panel, which then allows different apps to utilise your login without having to sign in to each and every one of them.

There is also integration with Photos and the camera so that you can instantly tweet pictures without having to open up a separate app. The same also goes for Maps integration.

Safari Reader

This is a new addition to Safari that removes any extra content from the screen to give you just the content you are viewing. In other words it will remove the address bar, etc and essentially present the content and nothing more. Again a handy feature that should make reading online a more comfortable experience.

Another nice feature being added to Safari is the Reading List, which gathers up a list of web pages you are interested in reading so you can read them later on.

Tabbed browsing is also being added with iOS 5, most useful for iPad users no doubt.

Reminders

The name gives the game away here really. This feature allows you to set reminders for yourself. The nice thing here is the content that can be included here. For example, you can set an actual to-do list as a reminder or even include location based reminders!

Hardware Camera Button

Yes you read that right! Finally, after years of people asking for it there is finally a hardware button to activate the camera! The button in question is the volume up button in case you wondered.

Whilst we're on the subject of the camera a camera access button has also been added to the lockscreen. It allows you to gain instant access to the camera without having to unlock your iPhone so you will be able to take pictures on the fly a little more quickly.

PC Free!

iOS is going fully wireless! No longer will you be forced to tether your device to your Mac or PC. This has two obvious ramifications; updates and initial setup. On the first point new firmware updates will be able to be downloaded over the air. It's another feature that's been long requested, especially since other mobile platforms have this feature. On the second point the initial setup will now be able to be completed on the device itself without having to tether to a computer. Instead of the 'please tether' message seen on current devices, iOS 5 will simply display a welcome message before instigating the setup process.

iMessage

This is a big one ... a very big one. In a nutshell it's an intra-iOS messaging service. For example, someone on an iPhone can message a freind on an iPod Touch. iMessage supports the sending of pictures and videos too. Oh and it all works over 3G and WiFi. The messages themselves are pushed to each device so think along the lines of RIM's BlackBerry message.

Ok so there we have some of the biggest new features of iOS 5. One thing that stood out today was the fact that some of these features seem to be ~~copied~~ closely based upon feature existing on other platforms. As I said above I'll get a bit more into that aspect of it all in a later post.

iOS 5 is due to launch in the autumn, presumably alongside the launch of the next generation of the iPhone.

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