With iCloud, iOS 5 and a new Mac OS, Apple pulled out all the stops last night by offering seemingly game-changing features. Was JOE’s tech expert impressed?
By Leo Stiles
While the entertainment world was fixed upon the L.A. Convention centre for the videogames industry annual orgy of announcements, Apple flew almost under the radar and used its own event, the World Wide Developers Conference(WWDC), to introduce new software and services that are likely to be a great deal more significant than anything that emerges from E3.
In the weeks leading up to the WWDC Keynote, the rumour mill had gone into overdrive and while previous Apple announcements had been predicted in a hit and miss fashion, this time the speculation was entirely on the money.
As usual, Steve Jobs took to the stage to the usual cheering and whoops from the assembled cult and wasted no time in getting to the point with three major announcements.
iOS 5 improvements
The constant and rapid refinement of Android has been one of the most impressive stories in the tech world over the last 18 months and with each new iteration, the iOS light became little dimmer. Make no mistake, Google are now the leading player in the arms race of the smartphone and are biting at the heels of the Apple in the tablet war. Which meant that Apple had do a lot to convince us that the iOS is future proof and that the iPhone 5 will be the smartphone to own when it launches in the autumn.
Thankfully, Apple seems to be aware of the shortcomings of their OS and even seemed to recognise the desires of their customers for once, with the biggest bugbear of most users being addressed with the new Notifications functionality.
Currently if you get a missed call, text or app notification, it will flash up in the centre of the screen while pausing the app you are using. This has always been annoying and depending on how many apps you have notifying you, it can be really intrusive. The new version compiles these notifications into a list that can be viewed by swiping a down and now each alert will just pop in at the edge of the screen while allowing you remain uninterrupted.
Jobs demonstrated features on Andre the Giant’s personal iPhone, pictured above
Twitter has also been embraced by iOS 5 and now you can tweet from all the native apps. No matter what you are doing you will be able to share this with your followers. This won’t change the world for non-initiates but for prolific Tweeters it should be nothing short of revelatory.
Email also received a big update and now features text formatting, indenting and automatic saves, along with a cool split keyboard that will make emailing on the iPad more flexible. To access this feature users just have to swipe their fingers to edge of the screen and it all happens automatically
The camera app has had a significant overhaul and can now be accessed from the lock screen, which is very welcome because we’ve always felt that having to unlock the iPhone and then find the app has been too lengthy a process for truly spontaneous photography. The same goes for Apple’s insistence that you take a snap by touching a virtual button and the company has even gone as far as to ban camera apps that make use of the iPhone’s physical buttons for shutter control.
Well, previous distaste for the feature hasn’t stopped them from including it in their own app this time and with iOS 5 the shutter button can be set to the volume up button of the traditional virtual one. This should make taking photos far more natural as you will be able to make hold the phone like a traditional camera without injury-inducing finger contortions.
Bright skies ahead for iCloud
All these features are nice but Apple’s decision to make the iOS completely independent of a PC, Mac and iTunes is the most significant.
iOS devices have always been dependent on the computer for activation, syncing and file transfer; a system that has always been a hassle. Just the requirement for activation though iTunes always meant that the iPhone and particularly the iPad, were not independent devices and together with a lack of a file system, this has hobbled their usefulness.
iOS 5 makes all of this a thing of the past and in conjunction with iCloud, all your data, including music and photos will be synced with the cloud rather than iTunes. Updates to the iOS and Apps will also be done wirelessly and free of the computer via the new Automatic Updates feature that will push every new update to your device in the background when it is connected to the internet via a Wi-Fi Connection.
The iPad will be the device that benefits the most here and finally justifies itself as a replacement to the PC or Laptop and this feature will secure the iPad’s dominance in the tablet market for the foreseeable future.
The only other noteworthy feature was iMessage, which is a unified messaging system that is shared between all iOS devices. There are a ton of apps that do this already and like Face Time it is a nice addition that we don’t think many people will actually use too often
Apple declined to detail just when iOS 5 will be available beyond a vague autumn timeframe, which is to be expected given that every version of the operating system makes its debut alongside their next iPhone. Current thinking puts the release of the phone and the OS sometime in September and as soon as we know the exact date, so will you.
Overall, iOS 5 is the right update, right when it was needed the most and the way in which it leverages the new iCloud service will be hard to match by any other company with the exception of Google. Mark our words; this just became a two horse race and any tablets not running iOS or Android will fall by the wayside over the next year.
Game-changer
Without doubt, iCloud is the most important thing to come out of the Apple labs since the introduction of the iPhone and the new service finally justifies the company’s vision of a post-PC future.
iCloud is essentially Apple’s cloud computing service and aims to take the file management away from the device you are using, be it Mac, PC, iPad or iPhone and put in a cloud storage system that not only takes the hassle out of storing your data, but moves the PC experience closer to the refined usability of their iOS system.
Everything that is pertinent to you and your device will be stored in Apple’s massive new data storage facility that includes your own files, email, music, photos, books, device settings and whenever you change something or add something new , the content will be automatically backed up to the iCloud.
A good example of this is when you take a photo on your iPhone. Right now the picture will be stored on your iPhone, taking up valuable and scarce space unless you sync your phone with your PC or Mac; a process that can often be more hassle than it’s worth. With iCloud, that photo will automatically be backed up for 30 days to the iCloud service, where you can choose to store it permanently or let it expire.
Here’s a picture of Apple’s slightly oppressive and scary iCloud storage centre
All of this will be free and will be accessed via a suite of apps that will be available when the service launches in the autumn. The service will replace the existing Mobile Me offering which allowed syncing of Mail, Photos and Calendar for the pricey sum of €70.
This is a massive departure for Apple and together with the abolition of iOS device dependency on iTunes and a computer, it moves the iPhone and the iPad from additions to your computing life to fully independent devices. The iPad in particular is now more of a threat to the traditional PC than ever before and you can almost hear the collective cry of dismay from competitors such as the Motorola Xoom and the Blackberry PlayBook.
Traditionally, Jobs likes to end his keynote presentations with a bang and right on cue he rounded of his iCloud demo with the highlight of the day: iTunes in the Cloud.
iTunes is the dominant force in digital music but we have to say that its way of doing business and its inflexibility of storage was creaky and clunky and fast becoming a problem for users. iCloud will move all of your iTunes purchases into the cloud where you can re-download any albums’ or songs to any device, as often as you like.
The limitations of music bought on iTunes has always been a pain in the ass with the record labels dictating that you could pay for music but if you lost it due to hardware malfunction or through the mismanagement of your five authorised devices, then that was your tough. Is it any wonder that music piracy has brought the industry to its knees with this sort of carry on?
Well iTunes in the Cloud is the end result of the record labels finally waking up and getting the message that it’s the users that decide how they use their purchases. Apple should be applauded for delaying this service in order to get the big boys on board but there is one feature that is for us, the star of the show and it’s called iTunes Match.
iTunes Match is a service that costs €24.99 a year. For this you will be able to upload any existing music you own to the iCloud, where it will enjoy all the same privileges that content bought through the iTunes Store has. So if you have a gargantuan CD collection that you ripped to hard drives, you can now have all these files stored safe and sound in the iCloud. Now here coes the clever bit.
iTunes Match does not bother to upload each and every file; instead it only uploads files that it cannot match to its library of over 18 million tracks. For the rest you it simply adds the same tracks from the iTunes store and depending on your collection this process can take just a few minutes of around an hour or so.
This is the announcement that blew us away and is a complete win for music lovers that for too long have been told what they can and can’t do with music they have legitimately bought and the autumn cannot come soon enough for us and our sizable CD collections.
OSX Lion
The biggest announcement were always going to be iOS 5 and iCloud but for Mac users the final reveal of OSX Lion is equally important, as it is the most significant update the Mac operating system since Leopard in 2007.
As expected the bulk of the new changes were a result of a desire by Apple to bring the lessons learned on the iPhone and iPad back to the Mac and most of the changes were all about accessibility and making navigation more intuitive and user friendly.
Chief amongst all this is the integration of gesture control via the Magic Track Pad which will allow you to use familiar swipe and pinch commands to fly around your desktop. A three-finger swipe upwards brings you into mission control which displays al open windows and then groups the together by category.
Application launch and control will now be done through the Launchpad which replicates the look and feel of the iOS and all apps will be able to run full screen, something that has been lacking for a long, long time.
The absolute pick as far as new features go was the universal auto-save. Just like in iOS apps, any work done on you Mac will now be automatically saved during use and on exit of the application and each save will generate a version that is archived until you finalise the document. This is a dream feature for anyone who forgets to save their work on a regular basis and is far more flexible that its Microsoft Office based counterpart.
There are a host of other tweaks and addition to the OSX with Lion that include updates to the clipboard and a fairly sizable update to the native email app that builds conversations and text formatting into the application. Full details can be found over at Apple.ie.
Anyone used to paying in excess of €200 for their Windows 7 when they upgraded from Vista will be wary of a new OS’s price tag. Thankfully, Apple has done the right thing and will sell Lion for €29.99 directly through the Mac App Store and while no specific date was mentioned, OSX Lion should go live sometime in July.
Verdict
The highlights of Apple presentations have always been hardware-based but the WWDC 11 Keynote shows just how important that software and services are to Apple’s continued meteoric rise to the top of the electronics world.
In OSX Lion, the lessons learnt on the sublime iOS are now part of the Mac experience, while iOS 5 is a timely refinement of the mobile operating system that fixes most of the issues that had been dogging the platform for years.
Most importantly, with iCloud Apple have the single most flexible and unifying service for their family of products that once again pushes them ahead of the competition. Google, the ball is back in your court.
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